Reflecting Back On Dark Mode

One year ago Dark Mode changed the appearance of our desktop with mac OS Mojave, 6 months ago Apple did the same for our phone with iOS 13.

Now that the dust has settled on the new iOS release, how is it holding up during day to day use?

Mac

I used to wonder if I’d find it useful when it came out. You see I always had text/code editors with a dark background and light text so in that regard not much would change. I couldn’t see any other use case where I’d have liked having dark mode and since that case was already covered I was pretty skeptical.

More than a year later I’m used to Dark Mode on mac and I always have it on. It is true that for the remaining applications I do not really care if they adopt dark mode or not, but I don’t have it on for applications. The great thing about having it on all the time is the menubar. It looks more sleek and clean in black. The desktop background is pretty nice as well, but you could have always change it and didn’t need dark mode for that.

iOS

On iOS I haven’t really used it too much, but not for the lack of trying. As soon an I installed iOS 13 I toggled it on. Unfortunately apart from Apple stock UI and apps not much else changed.

Be it the usual slow adoption in applications from big companies, be it that I simply do not use my iPhone a lot, I ended up turning it off after a month. Since then I did not notice any big difference during day to day use. I might try it again after iOS 14 rolls out this summer/fall and Google and co decide to finally adopt it in their applications.¹

Conclusion

All in all for me it was underwhelming.

On mac it is a simple change of color of the menubar and the desktop backround and on iOS companies like Google and Facebook have been super slow at adopting it (as they usually are with any new iOS feature).