YouTube For iPhone X: Dark Theme Reportedly Extends Battery Life

There’s one good reason why Google introduced a dark theme to the YouTube for iOS app with the latest update. Apparently, the new dark theme helps save power and extends the battery life of the iPhone X.

Apple Insider recently conducted some tests to find out if YouTube’s new dark theme has the ability to really lengthen the battery life of the 10th anniversary iPhone. The results conclusively confirmed that it does.

The Apple-centric news site performed two tests to determine the effect of the app’s new dark theme to the iPhone X. The outlet tweaked some settings before doing the tests. It turned off auto brightness, set auto-lock to “never” and turned up screen brightness to around 80 percent.

The first test involved leaving the YouTube app open for three hours. The app that had the usual bright white UI caused the iPhone X’s battery life to drop from 100 percent to 71 percent. On the other hand, the dark theme caused the handset’s battery to drop from 100 percent to 88 percent.

For the second test, Apple Insider played a three hour video on the iPhone X, but not in full-screen mode so that the UI is still in view. After the specified time, the bright theme caused the iPhone X’s battery life to dip to 55 percent. Contrariwise, the dark theme decreased the battery life of the handset to 76 percent.

Since the new dark theme extended the battery life of the iPhone X in both setups, Apple Insider concluded that YouTube’s new UI does save substantial power. It also pointed out that the dark theme does not, in any way, alter the user experience of the app. Instead, it gives the app a much cleaner look and makes the UI easier on the eyes.

In its explanation, the outlet said that the new dark theme was bound to extend the battery life of the iPhone X because the newest flagship phone has an OLED display. The dark pixels of OLED require less power compared to white pixels.

In addition, there is also a difference in how OLED and LCD panels work. OLED pixels output their own light, while LCD requires a light emitted from a backlight to travel through color-changing pixels to create an image. Because LCD screens need the backlight even when it is rendering a black image, iPhones with LCD screens could not benefit from the new dark theme of the YouTube app.