Google encourages dark themes in Android apps to save battery



[ad_1]

Users have long been asking for a dark theme in apps. As demand continues to grow due to the inherent luminosity of Google's Material theme, Google's apps have begun to adopt night modes. Now, the company's own research can quantify battery savings with darker interfaces.

During a session (via SlashGear) at the 2018 Android development summit, Google explained how application colors directly affect battery life. Unsurprisingly, increased brightness translates into increased energy consumption.

However, the most interesting discovery made by Googlers over the last two years concerns the specific energy appeal of certain colors. Blue consumes 25% more energy than green or red in an RGB arrangement. Black is at one end of the power spectrum and white at the other end.

Of course, this comes in the context of Google in 2015 announcing the design of materials where white is widely used and recent changes to the theme of materials address bright backgrounds. Google reports and notes the collection of dark themes for their applications over the past year.

Guess the color to which we have pushed you in recent years. The material was released three years ago and we move from Holo, which is a pretty dark theme, to this white theme. We sort of pulled ourselves in the foot, slightly, in terms of power.

The battery savings in YouTube for Android have been detailed when a video is played and paused. This case study revealed that the dark mode resulted in a 60% reduction in battery consumption compared to blank display.

Gboard also sees savings, the theming options of the application already allowing users to apply a darker aspect. In some applications, such as Google Maps, a dark mode naturally makes sense, especially at night.

The second half of the video provides various tips on how developers can implement dark themes and best practices, including inverting your display to begin the transition of an application.

More dark themes on Google:


Check out 9to5Google on YouTube for more information:

[ad_2]
Source link