Google has been granted a patent for reducing the quality of a mobile device’s display in order to preserve battery life as it dwindles, according to a report from DroidLife. The patent describes a system that disables animations or even reduces the resolution of the screen in service of reducing the display’s battery usage.

With the exception of smartphones designed with prodigious battery life as a feature, the devices often seem to be on the cusp of a battery fainting spell towards the end of a day. Lately, hardware manufacturers have been packing their devices with more milliamp-hours, lower-power-consumption chips, and more power-conscious displays, but Google has its own software-based approach to mitigating prematurely empty batteries.

In Google’s workflow, an OLED display on a low-battery phone would work through a number of functionality cutbacks as it lost power. Initially, the phone would stop using blur and animation functions during navigation, but it could also cut down the resolution and “command only black and red colors” to display what’s on the screen.

We’re not sure cutting functionality in the direst of battery situations is approaching the problem from the right angle, when phones are so thin and light now we wouldn’t mind a little more heft for the sake of more power. But in emergency situations, we’d rather have a screen display in red and black than no screen at all.