What is phone screen burn-in and can it be fixed?

OLED panels make light directly from an organic material in each sub-pixel, and that material dims as it is used. Pixels that display a bright static element for thousands of hours age faster than their neighbours, so when the screen later shows a flat colour, the worn areas appear as a faint ghost. LCD panels do not do this, which is why this was not a phone problem a decade ago.

Step by step

1. Test it properly.Display a plain mid-grey or light-grey full-screen image at moderate brightness in a dim room — a blank note, a solid-colour image, or a grey test page in a browser. Faint marks appear that are invisible in normal use. Then repeat with white, and with red, green and blue in turn; the colour a ghost is most visible in tells you which sub-pixel wore.
2. Give it an hour of ordinary use, then look again.This is the whole diagnosis. Image retention fades as the pixels settle; burn-in does not. If the ghost is unchanged after an hour of normal mixed content, it is permanent.
3. Check what shape it is.Burn-in follows whatever has been static and bright: the status bar, the navigation bar, an on-screen keyboard outline, a game's heads-up display, a navigation app's route panel, or the logo of a channel you watch constantly. If the ghost matches something you look at for hours, that confirms it.
4. Accept that it cannot be reversed.The material has aged. The apps and videos that claim to fix burn-in either clear residual image retention that would have faded anyway, or attempt to wear the surrounding pixels down to match — which makes the whole screen worse. There is no repair short of a new panel.
5. Reduce brightness, which matters most.Wear scales with how hard the emitters are driven. A phone kept at maximum brightness ages its panel far faster than one on auto-brightness in ordinary rooms. This is the single most effective preventative measure by a wide margin.
6. Shorten the screen timeout and turn off always-on display.Total hours of a static bright element is the other variable. A screen that sleeps after thirty seconds instead of five minutes cuts the exposure dramatically over a year, and an always-on display is by definition static content shown for hours.
7. Use dark themes for interfaces with large static areas.On OLED, a black pixel is genuinely off and therefore ages not at all. Dark mode in apps you keep open for long periods — navigation, reading, messaging — removes the wear rather than just reducing it.
8. Judge severity honestly before acting.A faint retention visible only on a grey test screen at low brightness is normal on a well-used OLED phone and is not a fault. Burn-in worth doing something about is visible during ordinary use on ordinary content. Do not go looking for it on a phone you were perfectly happy with.

Common mistakes

• Running a 'pixel refresher' or burn-in fixer video for hours — At best it clears temporary retention. At worst it drives the whole panel hard for hours and ages every pixel, which is the opposite of what you want.
• Concluding a phone is faulty from a grey-screen test — Every OLED panel wears. The test exaggerates it enormously. Judge on whether it is visible in normal use.
• Leaving a navigation app running on a windscreen mount at full brightness for years — Bright, static, hot and constant is every risk factor at once. This is the most reliable way to burn a route panel into a phone.
• Assuming a warranty will cover it — Burn-in is usually treated as wear rather than a defect, and warranties commonly exclude it or require it to exceed a threshold. Severe burn-in within a year is worth raising; gradual wear at three years generally is not.

Questions people ask