This month Apple released iOS 13 for the public and closed the Dark Mode gap between macOS and iOS. A system-wide Dark Mode (or Night Mode how some would call it) is not something new for everyone. People who are using Windows 10 and Android 10 have seen this functionality for quite some time already. In this article, I will elaborate a bit more about the current state of Dark Mode and the transition towards it being supported by companies and on the web.

The benefits of Dark Mode

We all know those moments when you are in the dark and you open up your phone or laptop and get blasted by its brightness.

Dark Mode is a perfect solution for that. But next to that it‘s good for:

Battery saving

Less sleep disruption

Reducing eye fatigue

Accessibility for people with visual impairments, migraines or other visual disorders.

I actually prefer Dark Mode during the day as well because of the reasons above and I think some apps look aesthetically better in a dark theme. Shout out to the people who are reading this in Dark Mode 🌚

The dark side of the web

Unfortunately, we are not completely there yet in terms of support on the web. There are multiple ways to turn ‘light-themed’ websites into ‘dark-themed’ website but it usually doesn’t work very well. I tried a couple of browser add-ons myself but it usually didn’t convert well and often made the website less accessible. There is a big difference between converting colors automatically and designing a dedicated color palette for when Dark Mode is enabled.

Something I discovered while doing research for this article is that Google Chrome now supports a CSS option called “prefers-color-scheme.” in version 76. When you enable this option, websites with a default white background will be converted to a dark theme and the other way around. After enabling this option, websites will change automatically based on the preference of your operating system. If you are a web developer and you want to know more about enabling this for your website, have a look at this article.

Emails

Another issue with using Dark Mode is the lack of support for emails. If I look in my current mailbox there are only a select amount of emails that blend in with the enabled Dark Mode on my device.