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Dark mode saves battery — but only on half the phones out there
💡 Dark mode meaningfully saves battery only on OLED/AMOLED screens, because their black pixels switch off entirely — on LCDs the backlight stays on regardless.
Everyone swears dark mode extends battery life, but whether it actually does depends entirely on what kind of screen you have. The trick works on OLED (also called AMOLED) displays, where every pixel makes its own light — a black pixel is a pixel that's simply switched off, drawing essentially zero power. Fill the screen with dark backgrounds and huge swaths of it go dark, cutting display drain by a meaningful amount.
On an LCD screen, the same trick does almost nothing. LCDs use a single backlight shining through the whole panel at once; the pixels only filter that light. "Black" on an LCD is still fully lit behind the scenes — the backlight never dims — so dark mode saves you close to zero battery there.
To know which you have: most flagship phones and newer models use OLED, while many budget and older phones use LCD. A quick check — open a pure-black image full-screen in a dark room. If the screen looks truly black and blends into the bezel, it's OLED and dark mode pays off. If you see a faint gray glow, it's LCD, and you're better off just lowering brightness.