SmartNight: Turning Off the Lights on Android

Abstract: Smartphone users benefit from content with dark color schemes: increasingly common OLED displays are more power efficient the darker the display, and many users prefer a dark display for night time use. Despite these benefits, many applications and the majority of web content are drawn with white backgrounds. There are many partial solutions to darken the displayed content, but none work in all situations. Enter SmartNight, a content-aware solution to dynamically darken content on Android. By trading off content fidelity, Android with SmartNight displays content with nearly 90% lower average picture level. It is implemented in the Android framework, and requires no external support. It seamlessly incorporates existing solutions, making it a bridge between the state-of-the-art and future solutions.