You can bet there are Youtubers who's been trying to burn in their iPhone X since launch and the fact that nobody has been able to do it is actually kind of surprising to me. It doesn't mean the screen won't burn-in, it will, it just means it's much more resistant than the Pixel 2XL's LG panels.
What is burn-in?
on an OLED screen, each pixel is simply a tiny LED light. These lights age and get dimmer with use. Ideally you would age the entire screen equally and it will just become slightly dimmer over time. However if that wasn't the case, if some of the pixels are turned on more than others (like with the software buttons on Android), those pixels will get dimmer quicker than others. So even when they are supposed to be showing the same brightness, they don't, and you will see a burn-in image.
Factors that affect burn-in
Since burn-in is just differential aging as described, what you basically want is to make all pixels age equally, and make them age slower.
The speed of aging is strongly tied to the brightness, or more specifically power consumption. So learning the details will not only make your screen last longer, it can significantly improve battery life.
When OLED gets bright, it consumes exponentially more power. So if you make your screen twice as bright (which actually only appears to be a step brighter to the eye), it consumes more than twice the power, and ages more than twice as fast. So obviously the first thing you want to do is avoid high brightness. Placing your iPhone X on the dash in a sunny day for navigation is probably a terrible idea to be doing on a daily bases.
However keep in mind how brightness is relative. Full white on 0% brightness may be exactly the same as deep gray on 100% brightness. Dark wallpapers, websites, apps and themes are your friend. Using a dark app under full sunlight may cost you just as much power as using a full white app in complete darkness.
Another pro tip is that the different colors actually age differently as well. Green uses the least power and ages the slowest, with red being slightly worse. Blue is massively less efficient (about 2x the power of green) and ages the fastest. So turning on night shift or otherwise making the screen more yellow or green can save you some power.
Avoiding differential aging
The second thing you can do is try to wear the entire screen evenly so the pixels age at the same time, none becomes significantly dimmer than the ones surrounding them. There are a couple of strategies:
For example, the home bar on the bottom flips color depends on what app you are using, so on average it would in theory age about the same as other pixels, plus it doesn't even show up on the home screen. The same can be said of the status icons in the ears.
What is burn-in?
on an OLED screen, each pixel is simply a tiny LED light. These lights age and get dimmer with use. Ideally you would age the entire screen equally and it will just become slightly dimmer over time. However if that wasn't the case, if some of the pixels are turned on more than others (like with the software buttons on Android), those pixels will get dimmer quicker than others. So even when they are supposed to be showing the same brightness, they don't, and you will see a burn-in image.
Factors that affect burn-in
Since burn-in is just differential aging as described, what you basically want is to make all pixels age equally, and make them age slower.
The speed of aging is strongly tied to the brightness, or more specifically power consumption. So learning the details will not only make your screen last longer, it can significantly improve battery life.
When OLED gets bright, it consumes exponentially more power. So if you make your screen twice as bright (which actually only appears to be a step brighter to the eye), it consumes more than twice the power, and ages more than twice as fast. So obviously the first thing you want to do is avoid high brightness. Placing your iPhone X on the dash in a sunny day for navigation is probably a terrible idea to be doing on a daily bases.
However keep in mind how brightness is relative. Full white on 0% brightness may be exactly the same as deep gray on 100% brightness. Dark wallpapers, websites, apps and themes are your friend. Using a dark app under full sunlight may cost you just as much power as using a full white app in complete darkness.
Another pro tip is that the different colors actually age differently as well. Green uses the least power and ages the slowest, with red being slightly worse. Blue is massively less efficient (about 2x the power of green) and ages the fastest. So turning on night shift or otherwise making the screen more yellow or green can save you some power.
Avoiding differential aging
The second thing you can do is try to wear the entire screen evenly so the pixels age at the same time, none becomes significantly dimmer than the ones surrounding them. There are a couple of strategies:
- If you watch videos often, switch between the two different landscape modes.
- Use the full screen mode rather than crop if possible.
- Don't watch Youtube on portrait extensively, the video is dark and followed immediately by lots of full white.
- Watch for apps that have these static elements like the Youtube description+recommendation+comment section. Avoid using them for long times, and especially on high brightness.
- Change wallpapers ever so often with different colors and patterns.
- Use perspective shift wallpaper or live wallpapers.
For example, the home bar on the bottom flips color depends on what app you are using, so on average it would in theory age about the same as other pixels, plus it doesn't even show up on the home screen. The same can be said of the status icons in the ears.
