I stuck with Spotify, and resisted Apple Music's rival streaming service, entirely because of Spotify's green-on-black theme. I switched to rival writing app Ulysses because I could customize cool blue text on a black background. My first user review on the Mac app store, in 2016, slams early Dark Mode adopter Simplenote - not for the background, but because an update had made its font too bright. Now, not to sound like a hipster goth or anything, but I was way out ahead of this trend. And this seems to suit our mood just fine, as if the entire world is entering a goth phase all at once. And Instagram's Dark Mode, released in October, was probably the greatest victory for the low-light feature in 2019.Īll in all, some 92 popular apps and services now offer Dark Mode, according to this exhaustive list. By that time, Facebook was testing Dark Mode on Android by December the option had spread to WhatsApp on Android. A 'secret' feature to enable Dark Mode in Messenger chats by typing a moon emoji, released in the spring, turned into fully-fledged Dark Mode in the fall. Twitter, not content with being somewhat dark (gray-blue) in 2018, went full dark in 2019.įacebook was relatively slow to get Dark Mode religion, but it is now converting quickly. Mac OS offered a la carte Dark Mode in 2018, then enabled Dark Mode across the board in its 2019 edition. Gmail, Slack, Soundcloud, the mobile version of Microsoft Office, and Google Chrome all went dark this year. Android Q did the same for the Dark Side of the mobile world (sorry not sorry, Android users). Apple's iOS 13 turned millions of iPhones dark at once. Back then, apps were just beginning to offer Dark Mode, where bright pixels were shunned in favor of a black background, supposedly easier on the eyes.įast forward to 2019 - and as the political darkness grew to impeachable proportions, the trickle of Dark Mode apps became a flood. Not just in the metaphorical sense of a global wave of authoritarianism and ignorance, but literally darker - on the screens in our pockets, bags, and on our desks. Indeed, the world did seem to want it darker.

'You want it darker?' the late Leonard Cohen asked on the title track of his ominous final album, released just weeks before Trump's election in November 2016.

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