Adaptive Brightness in Android Pie is more Intelligent than Ever

Android Pie Adaptive Brightness

Users have always struggled to understand the term “Adaptive Brightness” in Android. However some had an idea about the feature as it didn’t intend to work like “Automatic Brightness” in smartphones.

Automatic brightness refers to an understandable term to most as it works with the available light around you. More the ambient light, the more brighter the screen gets. Similarly the screen gets dimmer in dark environment. This is the simple concept that, users mostly thought, should work with Google’s Adaptive brightness. Well, that’s not the case.

Difference between Adaptive and Fully Automatic Brightness

Google’s Adaptive Brightness is a combination of both manual and automatic brightness factors. Google introduced it with Android L back in 2014 to overcome the flaw that automatic brightness may have. Use of light sensors supplied by different manufacturers may lead to incorrect reading of light, ending up with incorrect brightness. Still many users prefer the automatic brightness model, mostly due to having a good understanding of it.

Huawei Y7 Prime - Notification Panel, EMUI 5

Adaptive brightness, on the other hand, is different than fully auto-brightness. Unlike with manual brightness, the slider sets the adjustment factor to help the system for auto-brightness. With this model, the system used to keep the min/max adjustment factor in consideration when adjusting the brightness automatically according to your surroundings.

You normally would set the min/max brightness when the Adaptive brightness is ON. For instance, you would set the minimum-brightness in darker environment and the maximum-brightness in brighter environment. That actually helped avoiding the erroneous screen brightness by letting you move the slider anytime so that you could fix the brightness with the slider if system didn’t set it perfectly.

Other manufacturers including Samsung, LG and Huawei also used this but kept the term as “Automatic Brightness.” This led some users getting confused with sudden change of behaviour in the functionality of automatic brightness. Apple has also been featuring this kind of adaptive brightness since iOS 11.

Adaptive/Automatic Brightness Huawei

Android Pie with Even Improved Adaptive Brightness

In the age when artificial intelligence is making its capacity within smart devices, to help the system perform better in different kind of scenarios. Currently we have scene the smartphone photography using AI to produce better photo and video quality. Google is using its own machine learning to turn existing low-res pictures into high-quality images. Now the system will also learn to give you better brightness control in different environments.

The new Android Pie is featuring an Adaptive Brightness that will enrich itself over time with the help of machine learning. Unlike the previous model of Adaptive brightness that allowed the users to adjust the brightness every time in every different environment, the newer and improved model will learn from those adjustments you would made. That will lead the system to train over time so you would need to make less adjustments manually.

Android Pie Adaptive Brightness

Image Credits: Google/Android Developer

Google has observed from the test users that they started making less slider interactions after one week of use.

We’ve observed that after a week almost half our test users are making fewer manual adjustments while the total number of slider interactions across all internal test users was reduced by over 10%.

Android Pie Brightness Slider

Image Credits: Google/Android Developer

Considering it as a software based intelligence, you should expect it to get better over time. Also note that this just one of the many AI-based features that Android P is bringing to your devices.

Devices with new Adaptive Brightness

Google has released the new Adaptive brightness feature on Pixel devices right now with Android P software. You may expect other manufacturers to add the feature soon in their devices with upcoming builds of Android Pie to their devices.