I love Always-on displays (AODs). So much so, in fact, that I’ve written about how I want the feature to make its way to the PC market. The at-a-glance information provided by an AOD is unrivaled, capable of displaying the date, time, notifications, widgets, images, and even your wallpaper without fully turning on the screen.
For the most part, AODs are more battery efficient than you might expect, thanks to the use of OLED display panels across most mid-range and higher-end modern handsets. OLED screens turn off their pixels when displaying pure black on-screen, and so only the necessary pixels are lit up to showcase the AOD’s information.
Even still, the fact of the matter is that AODs do increase energy consumption by a small amount, which does compound over the course of a full day. On my Pixel 10, I’ve noticed that disabling the AOD is enough to wrestle me back about 10 percent of my battery capacity on the daily, which is no small amount.
Always-on displays are an always-on battery drain
For as much as I love AODs, there’s no denying that the feature consumes a demonstrable amount of my Pixel 10’s power pack on the regular. As an experiment, I decided to disable the feature altogether, and it netted me around an hour of extra screen time on average.
On Pixel phones, Google takes an all-or-nothing approach to the AOD. It can either be enabled or disabled, with no additional flexibility. As a lover of AODs, this is rather unfortunate, and I’m envious of Samsung Galaxy users for having added scheduling options as well as a Tap to show function. I’d love to see Google add more options to its Pixel AOD implementation in a future update, perhaps in Android 18.
As per Android Authority, Google does appear to be working behind-the-scenes to implement slightly more control over the AOD, namely with the option to automatically turn it off when no activity is detected for a certain amount of time. This would be an excellent compromise between battery life and functionality, and I hope to see it go live as soon as possible.
How to turn off Always-on display on Pixel
The feature is tucked away within display settings
If you happen to have a modern Pixel smartphone, then disabling the AOD is a fairly simple process. To do so, follow these steps:
- Launch the Settings application.
- Navigate to Display & touch > Always-on display.
- From here, simply toggle off Always-on display.
On older versions of Android, Pixel phones refer to the Always-on display feature as ‘Always show time and info.’ Toggling this entry off disables the AOD.
On most Android handsets that feature an AOD option, the steps required to disable the feature are fairly similar. Of course, many manufacturers skin the Android operating system and rearrange various settings, and so the exact location of the feature within Settings is subject to some variation. If in doubt, you can always look for the feature using the search function within your device’s Settings application.
It’s time to back the notification LED
I wish this feature never went extinct
In lieu of Always-on displays, I’d love to see the return of the venerable notification LED. These subtle status indicators were once common in the Android space, pulsing to notify you of missed status alerts and the like. AODs all but superseded the notification LED, but it came at the cost of extra battery consumption.
Now, there might be light at the end of the tunnel: Google’s latest Pixel 11 Pro series of smartphones feature a rear-facing multicolored LED module called HiLight, and it brings back some (but not all) of the notification LED’s traditional functionality. It’s a fairly under baked feature at launch, but my hope is that it’ll gain additional utility in future software updates.
In a perfect world, I’d want to see handsets embrace both AODs and notification LEDs. As I mentioned at the top, I love the functionality provided by an AOD, but not its added power drain. I’d love to have the option on Pixel to Tap to show the AOD, in addition to HiLight working across the board for any and all incoming notifications. This, to me, would be the perfect blend of technologies, and it would solve the power consumption issue in the process.
