I have always been sensitive to light. Ironically, I have spent a large portion of the last thirty years looking at bright white rectangles. Is it bad that I still see them when I close my eyes?
I am the person that wears sunglasses indoors. I turn the backlight on all of my screens as low as I can, anything to stop the eyeball frying white-out. Don’t get me started on the sea of over saturated light that most office spaces subject you to. Are they trying to give us all a free tan? You can imagine my elation when dark mode hit the scene a couple of years ago. It has a major problem though.
Even after all this time, Dark Mode isn’t available everywhere. Opening some of the most frequently used applications on my phone is like looking into the headlights of an on-coming car. Maybe Zuckerberg secretly wants us to stop spending so much time on Facebook?
Dark app and page backgrounds are about more than comfort. Forcing modern OLED screens to light all of those white pixels burns through your battery faster. Lucky for us, Android 10 has a hidden trick that enables Dark Mode for apps that don’t support it on their own yet.
The option to Force Dark Mode is in the hidden Developer Options menu. There’s a secret process to enable this menu. I promise I am not making this up. Open the settings menu and then go to About Phone. Look for Build Number, if you don’t see it then look under Software Information. Once you find Build Number tap on it (the words) seven times. After the first few taps a countdown will appear. When you complete all seven taps, exit settings.
Now close all of your open apps and open the settings menu again. Scroll all the way to the bottom and tap Developer Options. Scroll down until you see Force Dark Mode and tap it to enable the option. Open Facebook, Linked In, Amazon Shopping, or any other app that used to have a white background and embrace the darkness. This is an experimental feature and you are using it at your own risk. I haven’t had any issues with it yet on my Galaxy Note 20, if you do post the problem you ran into in the comments.
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