Question

I’m developing a web based mobile application and I was thinking about the default background color.

Do different color backgrounds use different amounts of battery life? For the best battery life should I choose black or white or some other color?

I would assume that because there’s a back light behind the LCD then white would use the least amount of power because no pixels would have to be turned on, is this assumption correct?

Answer 1

For most devices the background colour you use has no effect on the battery usage. The backlight intensity isn’t changed.

However on AMOLED displays the power consumption can vary “significantly”. See the wikipedia page for details:

“For example, our measurement shows that a commercial QVGA OLED display consumes 3 and 0.7 Watts showing black text on a white background and white text on a black background, respectively.”