What's adaptive brightness and how do you use it?

Most likely, your phone comes with a feature called “Adaptive Brightness”. This will automatically adjust your screen’s brightness, so you don’t have to constantly do it. It’s a useful feature, but not everyone really knows how to access it or what it’s for. Well, don’t worry. We’re here to tell you how to use Adaptive Brightness.

We’re also going to tell you why you even need this feature. Who knows, you might find it useful and start using it yourself. If you’re looking for some other neat Android guides, you can check the shortlist below.

What is Adaptive display?

So, before we get into how to use this feature, let’s talk about what it is. Adaptive display is a feature that will automatically adjust the brightness of your display. It’ll do this based on how much light is present in your environment.

If you’re in a dim environment, then there’s no reason to have your phone at full brightness. The system will dim the screen. But, if you move to a brighter location, then it will raise the brightness accordingly.

In order for it to work, you’ll need to have your front-facing camera uncovered. That’s how it’s able to see how much light is in your environment. If it’s covered, then your phone will think you’re in a pitch-black void and lower the brightness accordingly.

Why is Adaptive Brightness useful?

There’s no point in learning how to use this feature if you don’t know why it’s there in the first place.

Battery savings

The main reason for this feature has to do with battery savings. Plenty of people keep their phone’s brightness at 100% all the time. While that’s good for some scenarios, it’s not necessary when it’s nighttime or when you’re in a dark environment. Having your phone at full brightness when it’s dark is just a waste of battery.

The system is set to adjust the brightness to a comfortable level based on the environment’s lighting condition, the ambient light. It’s hard to notice, but there are plenty of times during the day when you just don’t need your phone that bright.

Comfort

The other reason has to do with comfort. Not everyone is comfortable with having their phone at full brightness. So, they tend to keep their brightness at a lower level. The Adaptive Brightness can keep it at a level that’s just right so they don’t have to constantly adjust the brightness whenever they go outside.

How to use Adaptive Brightness

Now, let’s talk about how to fully utilize this feature. Accessing Adaptive Brightness can be different depending on the maker of your phone. Some phone makers put the option for Adaptive Brightness right under the brightness slider.

If you pull down the notification shade and look at your brightness slider, there’s a chance that you’ll see a little checkbox that you can select. When you do, your phone will instantly enable the setting.

If you’re using a phone with stock or near-stock Android, then you most likely won’t have this option. Instead, you’ll need to go to the actual display settings.

In the notification shade, tap on the gear icon to get to your settings. Then, scroll down to the Display section. In the current version of stock Android, the Adaptive Brightness option should be the second from the top. You’ll see a toggle right next to it. Just tap on the toggle, and you’ll see your screen brightness change according to the ambient light.

Teaching the system

So, the system will adjust the brightness for you, but there’s no guarantee that it will choose the perfect brightness for you. It might be a little too bright or dark for your taste. However, with some devices (we know that Pixel phones do this) you’re able to “teach” the system your preferences.

When you enable Adaptive Brightness, you’ll still be able to move the brightness slider. It will adjust the brightness accordingly. If you do this, the system will start to learn your preferences.

So, if the system adjusts the brightness a little too low for the environment, you’ll just raise it a bit, and the system will learn that you want it at that brightness in those lighting conditions.

Other display settings

So, that’s how you access and use the adaptive display, but there are other settings that you can adjust to make your smartphone experience better. Starting off, we have the screen timeout time. This is the amount of time it takes for your screen to turn off after you stop using the phone.

You will want to adjust this setting especially if you tend to leave your phone unattended for long periods of time. You can set your phone to go to sleep after just a few minutes if unused. This will lead to battery savings.

If you like to read on your phone a lot, then you might want to use the blue light filter. This is the name of the general function, but it goes by many other names depending on the manufacturer. It could be called “Night light”, “Reading Mode”, etc.

What this feature will do is filter out the blue light coming from your screen. Doing this makes the screen more comfortable to view. Also, studies show that watching a screen with a lot of blue light makes it harder to sleep at night. So, if you’re reading before bed, you might want to enable it.