Just over a year ago I bought a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 [1]. About 3 months ago I noticed that some of the Ingress menus had burned in to the screen. Back in ancient computer times there were “screen saver” programs that blanked the screen to avoid this, then the “screen saver” programs transitioned to displaying a variety of fancy graphics which didn’t really fulfill the purpose of saving the screen. With LCD screens I have the impression that screen burn wasn’t an issue, but now with modern phones we have LED displays which have the problem again.
Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a free screen-saver program for Android in the Google Play store. While I can turn the screen off entirely there are some apps such as Ingress that I’d like to keep running while the screen is off or greatly dimmed. Now I sometimes pull the notification menu down when I’m going to leave Ingress idle for a while, this doesn’t stop the screen burning but it does cause different parts to burn which alleviates the problem.
It would be nice if apps were designed to alleviate this. A long running app should have an option to change the color of it’s menus, it would be ideal to randomly change the color on startup. If the common menus such as the “COMM” menu would appear in either red, green, or blue (the 3 primary colors of light) in a ratio according to the tendency to burn (blue burns fastest so should display least) then it probably wouldn’t cause noticable screen burn after 9 months. The next thing that they could do is to slightly vary the position of the menus, instead of having a thin line that’s strongly burned into the screen there would be a fat line lightly burned in which should be easier to ignore.
It’s good when apps have an option of a “dark” theme, that involves less light coming from the screen that should reduce battery use and screen burn. A dark theme should be at least default and probably mandatory for long running apps, a dark theme is fortunately the only option for Ingress.
I am a little disappointed with my phone. I’m not the most intensive Ingress player so I think that the screen should have lasted for more than 9 months before being obviously burned.