August 19(ABC): Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night or early morning, grab your phone, and unlock it, only to have your eyes singed by the blinding light from the screen? That’s because of the millions of pixels on the phone’s screen bombarding your unprepared eyes with photons. The blinding effect is somewhat similar to that of leaving a dark cinema room and entering a sunlit area. While the blinding cinema effect can be avoided with tinted shades, enabling night mode is the right path forward when it comes to smartphones.
The situation around dark mode is somewhat tricky. Both Android and iOS offer a dark mode setting for changing the UI color palette from plain white to pitch black. However, the setting doesn’t apply universally to all of the apps installed on your phone. Instead, you will have to dig into each app’s settings and find if it offers a choice between light and dark themes. Some apps offer a third dynamic option that changes the UI color based on the default system setting on your phone — that’s the best implementation, as users don’t have to worry about enabling it first at the system level and then individually for each app when needed.
On the flip side, people with astigmatism (which affects 50% of the population) can find it harder to read white text against a dark background, according to research from the Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group at the University of British Columbia (via Gizmodo). Some users have highlighted dark mode accessibility issues, too.