Google Suggests Dark UI Mode Could Finally Be Coming to Android

Google focuses more on the interface and user experience of Android more than it ever has in the past. Android Pie is more thoughtfully designed than past versions of the platform, and Google’s interface design is coming together on app and service at a time. However, it’s coming together with a lot of white. At Google’s Android Dev Summit, Google more or less confirmed a dark UI mode is happening, but it didn’t say when.

Google has nibbled around the edges of dark mode for years, which has to be one of the most requested features of the OS among users. Starting back in the Android M beta (later Marshmallow), Google included a dark mode toggle that changed the settings and system UI from white to dark gray. However, the feature didn’t survive to the final release. Again in the Android N beta, we saw dark mode. Surely this time we’ll get it, right? But alas, Google removed it from the final build of Nougat.

Naturally, Android enthusiasts have been irked that Google is basically teasing us with dark mode only to go and make all its apps even more white than they once were. Now, it looks like there is finally change on the horizon.

At the Dev Summit, Google shared testing data on power consumption in apps with various colors. It used an original Pixel XL as the test device. Since most high-end phones use OLED panels, there’s no backlight that has to be on all the time. So, certain colors can use less power because the light comes from the pixels themselves. Black pixels use no power because they’re completely off. Indeed, Google’s data showed that the phone used less than a fifth as much power when displaying black as opposed to white.

Google went on to acknowledge the prevalence of white in its apps and the way it pushes devs to use it, but there could be a method to its madness. Presenting this data to developers seems like the first step of making a case that integrating dark UI options is important. There are already some signs of change. The official Google Dialer, Messaging, News, and YouTube apps all have configurable dark modes now.

For this to happen on a system level, Google will need to make it part of a future Android upgrade. It’s been encouraging developers to adopt the new Material Design guidelines, which provide more freedom than the old version. It also makes it easy to swap in different colors. My guess is Google will include an API in an upcoming Android release that will allow Material apps to flip their theme based on a system-level toggle. Google is just priming the pump with all these white apps.

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