Android 9 Pie Feature Focus: Adaptive Brightness
- Paul Thurrott
- Aug 13, 2018
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Android 9 Pie has a feature called Adaptive Brightness that’s a bit like auto-brightness on steroids. AI steroids.
“Most modern smartphones will automatically adjust the brightness [of the device] given the current lighting conditions,” Google’s Dave Burke explained during his Google I/O keynote this past May. “But it’s a one-size-fits-all. They don’t take into account your personal preferences and environment.”
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Adaptive Brightness aims to prevent the all-too-common situation in which the Android user has to manually adjust the display brightness using an on-screen slider that then later makes the display look too washed out or dim as conditions change.
To do so, Adaptive Brightness uses on-device machine learning to learn how you typically set the display brightness given different ambient lighting conditions. Then, it will automatically adjust the display brightness for you as the lighting around you changes. And do so in a way that respects your device’s battery life.
What’s kind of fun about this feature is that you can watch the brightness slider move automatically as the lighting conditions around you change: To see this in action, open the notification shade fully by swiping down from the top of the display. Then, move between areas of different lighting. It’s mesmerizing, so try not to walk into anything in a dark room.
Adaptive Brightness is enabled by default in Android 9 Pie, in Settings > Display > Adaptive brightness. And as is the case with a similar and related feature called Adaptive Battery, there’s not a lot by way of configuration: You can just enable or disable it, and machine learning will do the rest.
“Adaptive Brightness is extremely effective,” Burke said. “In fact, we’re seeing almost half of our … users now make fewer manual brightness adjustments compared to any previous version of Android.”