After having it removed in favor of the Pixel-only (for now) Night light feature in Android 7.1, Nexus fans have been a bit upset that the screen tinting Night Mode option was axed from their handsets. While only implemented as part of Google's experiment test zone, the system UI tuner, Night Mode struck a chord for a number of reasons (which aren't worth getting into here), and taking it away had Nexus owners a bit, well, cranky. Enough so that people have been submitting the feature's sudden absence in Android 7.1 as a bug. (Technically, Night Mode was removed in the later 7.0 developer previews, but if you didn't wipe your handset, the quick settings tile to enable it didn't go away for quite some time after that, and an app later was still able to access it via a simple workaround.)

One of those bug threads on the Google issue tracker has now been marked as 'FutureRelease' by a Googler. No comments were entered regarding the status change, so it's impossible to know what that really means. Will Google simply add the same old Night Mode back to the system UI tuner on Nexus devices? Or was the status just entered as a mistake? Or is something else entirely different being done about it? At this point, we can't really know, so we'll just have to wait this one out and see what happens. Maybe we'll have a better idea when Android 7.1 final or the next developer preview are released for the affected devices.