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Show HN: I built OLEDify to help save battery by pure-blacking your wallpapers

49 points by busymom0 ↗ HN
Download: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oledify-pure-black-wallpaper...

OLEDify converts regular dark wallpapers into Pure Black wallpapers (#000000 - pixel is off). Since the pure black pixels are off, it helps reduce battery use on the newer phones with OLED and AMOLED screens. More research on this can be found here:

https://www.greenbot.com/article/2834583/how-much-power-does...

iPhone X is the first iPhone with OLED screen. Even if your iPhone doesn't have an OLED screen, I find pure black wallpapers looks super crisp and nice!

I built this app from feedback from the /r/AmoledBackgrounds sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/Amoledbackgrounds/comments/95mz1l/i...

Before (background is dark grey, not black):

https://i.redd.it/w098c8sefpa11.jpg

After:

https://w.oledify.com/946E9804-842D-4B8A-AA35-C8C54A1B25DD_p...

Demo:

https://streamable.com/fhtgx

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/br5kdflkniwt9u0/AADkRawLrLR3isiEs...

- The app is 100% free to use and has no ads. I noticed a few people requested a donate/tipping on the AmoledBackgrounds subreddit post, so there is a Tip Jar option but it's not required to unlock any features. Only if you really really find the app useful and wanna buy me a beer, you can use the tip jar. If you don't want Apple to take 30% cut, I setup a paypal here:

https://paypal.me/OLEDify

- The “Crop & Resize” tool in the app can be used to resize & fit wallpapers for your screen. This is useful when you have an image which doesn't perfectly fit your screen. You can create a new image of the suitable size for your screen size.

- The app also contains a "Post to Reddit" option which posts the edited wallpaper directly to the /r/AmoledBackgrounds sub.

- As you drag the sliders, the updates to the image happen in realtime on the GPU instead of CPU and are quite fast.

16 comments

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loganed
It was because of this post I stopped playing with legos.
gcb0
wow. it took apple over 15 years to catch up with OLED?! I haven't touched LCD since nexus One was out...
jasonmp85
Didn't know the Nexus One came out four years before the first iPhone.
orliesaurus
Wait, are there people who live the screen on just to look at their wallpaper?

Usually my routine goes like this:

- Unlock screen

- Tap app

- Use app(s)

- Be done with app

- Lock screen

lovich
As a data point, I frequently hit the power button on my phone to see the text notification I just received. On my phone that means the wallpaper is about 3 quarters of the screen so if the pipes were actually off it would cut the energy usage by a fair amount
[deleted]
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devit
I find a solid black wallpaper (also known as "no wallpaper") to be the best choice, especially on OLED screens.
giobox
Happy to be proven wrong, but at a guess this surely makes close to no real difference to battery life in reality? Who unlocks their phone and just stares at the wallpaper behind their icons?

I suspect most users are only briefly on their home screens before doing something productive, like, you know, actually using an application, in which case the power savings afforded by this would likely be negligible at best.

There's nothing wrong with just saying make the wallpaper black on OLED because you think it looks nicer on OLED displays (who doesn't like OLED black levels?), which is a far more logical reason to do this.

busymom0
I often use my phone mostly for looking at the bus time widget. So the wallpaper and the wallpaper background of the widget does make a difference (admittedly small difference). Note that the app can be used not just for oledifying wallpapers - you can edit wallpapers on it too and crop/resize them for your different screen sizes etc. The main reason I built this was for the crisp true blacks and then from the research, I found it might make a small difference in battery life too.
scns
I red hn via materialistic, an app with a black theme. Saves battery and my eyes
cypherg
Artist credit: Nychos the Weird