In the feature description of a tracker, a Googler states that “dark mode is an approved [Android] Q feature and the “Q team wants to ensure that all preloaded apps support dark mode natively.”
Highlights:
- Android Q may have a system-wide Dark Mode.
- The tip has been spotted in a tracker created by a Googler.
- All preloaded apps may also support dark mode natively.
Google has been introducing Dark Mode across its services for some time, and in November last year, it finally acknowledged that the mode helps conserve battery on smartphones with OLED panels. On these lines, the company now seems to be working to embrace a system-wide Dark Mode and will reportedly introduce it in the next major OS update, that is, Android Q. According to a Googler, the dark mode is an “approved Android Q feature.”
Spotted by AndroidPolice, a Chromium Gerrit tracker created by Googler Lukasz Zbylut (LinkedIn profile says he’s Product Manager at Google) says that the “[Android] Q team wants to ensure that all preloaded apps support dark mode natively.” Reportedly, “all preloaded apps” implies that Google is referring to only Android Open Source Project (AOSP) apps, which could mean that all their first-party pre-loaded apps may have dark themes.
The report says that there are several links to internal Google documents that can't be accessed, but “all show that Dark Mode is a serious undertaking at Android HQ.” There’s also a mention of modifying content loaded in Chrome is not part of this project. Google Chrome doesn’t have a Dark Mode but has dark themes on the web. Recently, a report claimed that Google is working on native dark mode in Chrome for Windows 10 as well as for MacOS Mojave.
The tracker also states, “In order to ship dark mode successfully, we need all UI elements to be ideally themed dark by May 2019”. This is around the time when the company’s annual developer conference Google I/O takes place at its HQ in Mountain View. As on now, Google has changed the permissions of the thread and has made it inaccessible to people who are not associated with the company. If you still want to access the entire thread, you can visit this link.
Google has already rolled out a Dark Mode to Android Messages, Google News, and YouTube for Android. When YouTube initially announced Dark Mode for mobile devices, it also introduced a new feature that filled black stripes on the sides of a video that is being played horizontally. For vertical videos, the black stripes are changed to white in colour and the standard 16:9 videos use up some of the screen’s extra white space to enhance the video size without impacting its quality.
Related Read:
Facebook is reportedly testing dark mode in Messenger
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