A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine sent me a text message that, for a variety of reasons, I never thought I'd see. In just a single sentence he gave me some genuine surprise for the middle of week. And, even better, led me to ask some serious questions.
That text? It was my friend telling me that he had stopped using dark mode.
Now, I don't know about you, but dark mode still feels like a demanded feature for smartphones (and probably tablets) these days. It's a big deal when companies like Google and Apple officially announce support for the feature in their operating systems, and for developers who launch apps with the feature baked in. It still feels like a very big deal!
I'm writing this in an app -- iA Writer -- that allows me to switch on dark mode if I want. It is activated right now and it has been for a long time. I wouldn't be surprised if I turned it on the moment I could and I probably never looked back. It just feels like the default way to use the app now.
And that's how I feel about a lot of apps in my daily use. Which is admittedly strange considering this is a mostly new experience. Dark mode only arrived in iOS last year with the arrival of iOS 13. And there are still some apps out there that follow their own path and don't support either automatic OS switching or a dark mode of their own.
Which seems crazy to me. I can still remember Facebook making a big deal about dark mode coming to its mega-popular Messenger app. And I don't think anyone who watched Apple unveil system-wide dark mode for iOS will ever forget how big a deal they made it on stage.
So my friend told me he turned off dark mode and I asked him why, what on earth was he thinking, did he switch away from an OLED phone, and did he already switch back before I even texted him back? He informed me he hadn't switched away from his iPhone 11 Pro Max, he was perfectly sane, he hadn't switched back, and he didn't plan on switching to dark mode again anytime soon.
So I gave it a shot and . . . I didn't last. I even tried it on my desktop apps and I couldn't stick with it. I've been using light backgrounds in apps for so long that just switching to dark mode feels like something different and I think I'll go with that for now. I may one day stop using dark mode, too, but I think for now it's going to remain my default.
What about you? Whether you're using an OLED screen in your smartphone or device or not, do you rely on dark mode more often than not? Or are you using light backgrounds in your apps and software? Let me know!