The study also dove into night light and some other interesting findings, but this is the most relevant bit to me regarding a dark style preference.Ĭlearly there’s an accessibility and usability angle here. I wanted to look into behaviors and opinions around three distinct areas of user interfaces: custom styles, dark modes, and night light modes.Ī longer-form writeup of the study is available here, but in summary, I found that an overwhelming majority (88%) of respondents said they sometimes or always use a dark style when given the choice, and 81% of that group are using dark modes to address factors outside of their device like getting headaches, combating eye strain, or working in a darker office. In addition to listening to folks across the elementary, Pop!_OS, and GNOME issue trackers, social media, and in-person at hackfests, meetups, and conferences, I also decided to conduct a study to see if I could identify patterns in the data over 1,500 users of various OSes and environments like Android, GNOME, Ubuntu, and macOS (and dozens more) participated, giving me a decent look into this group of users. In my time contributing to elementary and GNOME, I’ve become familiar with pleas from users to implement official support for arbitrary themes - while that itself is a large and controversial topic, I have been working over the past few years to better understand the why behind these requests. Note: I’m explicitly using the language “Dark Style Preference” for a reason! As you’ll read further on, it’s important that this is treated as a user “preference,” not an explicit “mode” or strictly-enforced “setting.” It’s also not a “theme” in the sense that it just swaps out some assets, but is a way for the OS to support a user expressing a preference, and apps to respond to that preference. Many apps designed for Android, iOS, and elementary OS today already ship their own built-in light/dark style toggle, but with the latest OS releases, there is a new expectation that this is a standard, user-togglable preference of the OS, propagated to apps and even the web.
However, there’s a groundswell for user-determined dark style preference across platforms and experiences. There is a new expectation that this is a standard, user-togglable preference. Users who wished to override the system-wide stylesheet in an effort to save their eyes or better match their environments were either out of luck or left with a mess of broken apps. Accessibility features that invert the whole display have existed, but they’re not pleasant to use.Ĭonsequently, dark styles have typically been relegated to the app’s decision - if it’s a media app, made for dark environments, etc, then it can choose to ask for a dark style. For a time, GNOME even provided a hack via Tweaks that overrode an environment variable to force the dark variant on apps, as if the apps themselves had opted in.
For ages you’ve been able to forcibly change out the system style on GTK, KDE, Android and Windows with something that’s dark by default instead of light, but this causes issues when apps don’t expect it (since the default is typically light).
It’s time for the FreeDesktop to catch up. In the past year or so, macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, Chrome OS, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox have begun testing or released a user-set dark style preference that developers can opt into. Cassidy James Blaede Co-founder & CXO Fri, May 17, 2019