Google Maps has an option for manual dark mode in navigation

We may earn a commission for purchases made using our links.

Google Maps is one of Google’s most successful products thanks to the accuracy of its data, user interface, and features. Like every other Google app on Android, Google Maps is often subjected to A/B testing. This time, however, we’re not bringing you news about the slow rollout of a new feature. Today, we would like to draw your attention towards a feature that is possibly new, but we’re not really sure when it became available. In any case, it’s something that many of you may have looked for in the past but never noticed that it’s available in Google Maps: a manual dark mode toggle for when you’re navigating.

Although Google has been hard at work providing dark themes for applications like Messages and Phone, Google Maps has actually already had a dark mode built-in. However, the dark mode only activates at night or when Maps detects that you’re going underground. When the dark mode is activated, the navigation background gets dark so your phone’s bright screen won’t blind you.

If you want to enable this dark mode for all future navigations in Google Maps, open up the app and go to Settings > Navigation settings > Map display. You’ll see an option to override the default color scheme under “Map display.” Here you can manually change the navigation color scheme to day or night. Here’s a screenshot of the option.

It’s set to ‘automatic’ by default. If you set it to ‘day’, the navigation will always use the light theme even at night or when you’re underground. On the other hand, the ‘night’ switch will force Google Maps to always show the dark mode during navigation. While this still isn’t the full implementation of the dark theme that most of us would like, it’ll save your eyesight while in the mode in which you’re most often in – navigation.

Again, we’re not sure when Google rolled out this feature. We know that the app has automatically switched between day and night for a while now, but we’re not sure when they added the option to change it manually. Thus, this is a heads up for those who didn’t know this feature existed – we certainly didn’t until it was brought to our attention by Redditor /u/wrangler04.