Dark mode is a display theme (color setting) that darkens the appearance of your phone's operating system or app. Your phone's normal color setting is predominantly light; a dark mode reverses this. Thus, less light radiates off your phone and your eyes are less likely to get tired. Another benefit of dark mode is that your battery lasts longer. Because all the colors are less bright, less energy is required from your phone.

Zooma launched dark mode for the TimeSquare app last week. TimeSquare is an app where you can find information about many cool festivals and venues throughout the Netherlands. For TimeSquare the dark mode is a real addition! By activating the dark mode your battery lasts longer and you have more time to record videos of your favorite artist. Also, now you don't blind everyone when you grab your phone during a concert. Better!

Developing dark mode for iOS proved easier than for Android. This is because iOS uses "adaptive colors. This means that iOS itself looks at what mode is on and then automatically calculates what color should look like when you switch modes. With Android, 'adaptive colors' does not exist and changing colors has to be done manually in the code.

A nice trick our developers used while implementing dark mode is using a screenshot as an animation. If you turn on dark mode in your iPhone's settings, the screen switches colors via an animation. However, if you try to program this into an app, there is no animation... Our developers solved this by taking a screenshot of the current appearance, changing the colors to dark mode in the background, and then fading out the screenshot so it looks just like an animation. No one sees it! :-)

At Zooma (almost) all our devices are set to dark mode, nicer for the eyes while programming and designing. Is your phone or laptop already on dark mode? Or do you prefer the familiar white screen?