If you spend a lot of time staring at screens all day (and all night, for that matter) many of you are no doubt glad to increasingly have a dark mode option become a more familiar part of your smartphone experience.
Personally, Gmail is one of the apps I’m glued to for most of my waking hours, so it’s certainly welcome to see that a dark mode for Gmail is finally rolling out. The caveat is that this is for the Android version of the app only, and you’ll need to be running Android 10.
Android 10, released more than a week ago, has its own system-wide dark mode. Google, nevertheless, had also planned to tee up dark mode options for its first-party apps, though dark modes for some biggies (Gmail and the Google Play Store) weren’t ready in time for the Android 10 release.
Per XDA Developers, the most current release of Gmail for Android comes with a dark mode baked in that puts white text atop a pleasant, dark gray shading. You’ve actually got three shading options — a light and dark version, as well as the system default. The compose screen and messages screen also adjust to the dark mode as well.
One reason we might not have seen a similar dark mode roll out yet for the Play Store app has to do with the interface that relies in large part on the presence of all the app icons, but that’s just a guess as to why that one still hasn’t arrived. Nevertheless, it is certainly welcome to see another key app adjust and offer users the choice of an option that’s easier on the eyes.
Speaking of Android 10’s system-wide dark mode, we’re also now a week out from the release of iOS 13 which will likewise finally bring a system-wide dark mode to iOS devices. That’s something Apple teased earlier this year in its iOS walkthrough, as we noted here.
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