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You can now easily reset Adaptive Brightness in Android 9 Pie to factory defaults

The Device Health Services app provides “personalized battery estimates based on your actual usage” for devices running Android 9 Pie. Version 1.6 is rolling out now and allows users to quickly reset Adaptive Brightness.

Device Health Services was first updated via the Play Store in October shortly after the launch of the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. The app is responsible for calculating how current usage impacts the remaining battery life, and provides an easy-to-understand time estimate.

Recent updates added backend “model & infrastructure improvements,” but version 1.6 is now rolling out with one user-facing addition. You can now “Return adaptive brightness to the factory default settings.”

Adaptive Brightness leverages machine learning models from Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind to “automatically adjust brightness based on your environment and activities.” The goal is that overtime Android will learn your preferences and no longer require input. To train that model, you can manually move the slider “to help adaptive brightness learn your preferences.” This new option is useful for retraining those ML models when needed, like moving to a new environment with different lighting patterns.

The reset option is available by going to the system App info page for Device Health Services and then “Storage.” In the past, tapping “Clear storage” would allow users to “delete app data” like any other application.

With Device Health Services 1.6, it opens a screen with two options. The first lets users “Reset adaptive brightness” and the second is the standard “Clear all data.” Customized text notes how this also removes “battery statistics and adaptive brightness data.” The “Total Storage” taken up by the app is also noted.

Presumably, “Clear storage” in the past also reset Adaptive Brightness, but at the expense of clearing battery statistics and other data. Device Health Services 1.6 is rolling out now via the Play Store, though it’s not yet widely available.

Dylan contributed to this article


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Avatar for Abner Li Abner Li

Editor-in-chief. Interested in the minutiae of Google and Alphabet. Tips/talk: abner@9to5g.com