We've seen dark modes spread in a big way in the past couple of years, with system-wide dark themes going live in Android and iOS and many popular apps adding the feature, too. Now another major app has added a dark mode.
WhatsApp today launched dark mode for its Android and iOS apps. It offers a familiar WhatsApp design but with a darker look to reduce eye strain in low light environments.
When designing its dark mode, WhatsApp says that it focused on two particular details. That includes readability, making sure that it chose colors that minimized eye fatigue and are close to the system defaults on Android and iOS. WhatsApp also wanted to be sure it used colors and design elements that helped the most important information stand out.
If you've using WhatsApp on Android 10 or iOS 13, you can enable dark mode by turning it on in your system settings. Folks on Android 9 and below can turn on dark mode in WhatsApp by going into WhatsApp Settings > Chats > Theme > "Dark".
Dark mode will be rolling out in a new version of WhatsApp over the coming days. You can download WhatsApp for Android here, and WhatsApp for iOS can be found here.
WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging apps around, so it's great to see it finally add a dark mode to fit in with the dark themes found on Android 10 and iOS 13. Once you get dark mode in WhatsApp, tell us what you think of it!