WIRED
Dark mode is here to help with a feeling many people will be familiar with the feeling: after hours spent looking at screens your eyes get tired and the white background of just about every web page and app can seem blinding, no matter how low you turn down the brightness.
It switches the colours of your screens, to give everything a black or dark background with white text and objects. You can use it on your phone or computer, on just specific apps or across a whole operating system.
Fans of dark mode will wax lyrical on the benefits – that it will help eye strain, make text more legible and improve battery life. A (very!) small study of seven people from University of Tuebingen found that light mode could increase risk of myopia, otherwise known as shortsightedness. But when it comes to empirical evidence, large studies are thin on the ground.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t choose to use dark mode – it’s all about doing what feels good for you. It can certainly help to reduce glare in low light, so that you’re not as blinded when looking at your phone in a dark room. It can also be better for people with visual impairments such as photosensitivity, cataracts or astigmatism.
“You're aware of your limitations and what you're experiencing as an individual,” says Lauren Kelly, behavioural design director at BehaviourStudio. “You're adapting the technology to you, as opposed to it being preset.”
iOS
While dark mode is good on an older display, it’s great if you have an OLED display (iPhone XS or later). This means that instead of colouring the pixels black, they are simply not lit, allowing for a higher contrast and increased battery-saving potential. If you have an older iPhone, Apple has still gone for a true black theme with dark grey in some places to maintain readability.
To enable dark mode on iOS, the easiest way is to swipe from the home screen to get to the control centre, down from the top right on an iPhone X or newer, or up from the bottom on an iPhone 8 or older. Press and hold on the brightness slider and tap ‘Appearance’ on the bottom left to switch between light and dark modes as you please. You can even add a dark mode dedicated button to the control centre by going to settings > control centre > customise controls. This can be particularly useful for reducing glare quickly when you need it.
A more conventional way to switch to dark mode on iOS is to go to settings. Tap ‘Display & Brightness’ and tap either ‘Light’ or ‘Dark’ to choose which appearance you want. You can also tap the toggle underneath to set dark mode to come on automatically — simply go on ‘Options’ after turning it to automatic to choose when dark mode comes on, either sunset to sunrise every day or at times of your choosing.
Android
Dark mode on Android, or dark theme as Google likes to call it, automatically switches the colours for nearly every Google-owned app. Youtube, Gmail and Chrome will be set to a dark background so you don’t have to worry about suddenly having to squint to read when one of these apps is still bright white.
Dark mode only became available for Android in November 2019 and can only be used on the Android 10 operating system or newer, so older phones won’t be able to use it.
