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Android Q’s dark mode is darker than the Battle of Winterfell

Android Q’s dark mode is darker than the Battle of Winterfell

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A dark mode by any other name is still just as cool

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Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge

It’s been requested by users for ages, and Google has finally listened: Android Q will offer a true dark mode (officially called Dark Theme), the company announced onstage at Google I/O 2019.

Dark Theme works pretty much as you’d expect: hit a toggle on your device from the Quick Settings menu, and everything will change from white to black — and actual black, not the dark gray that we’ve seen from apps like Twitter. In theory, this should help with battery life, particularly on OLED phones. To that end, Dark Theme will also automatically activate when an Android Q phone is put into battery-saving mode. If nothing else, it looks cool.

Of course, none of this helps if apps don’t actually support the dark mode, which is why Google is looking to take the lead here with its Android apps first. The company is promising that every first-party Android app it makes will work with the dark mode, although it may take some time for Google to get to them all.

Google will also offer developers an API for switching over to a dark mode when the theme is activated so that they can make sure their apps follow the rest of the operating system. For developers who want a simpler method, Google is also offering a hacky option that will just invert colors in an app if they don’t want to develop a more robust dark theme.

Android Q still doesn’t have a final release date, but if history is anything to go by, it’ll roll out to devices sometime in the fall.