A powerful Android dark mode enhancement
Ready to take your Android dark mode experience to a whole new level? JR RAPHAEL reports
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about my fellow Android users in recent years, it’s that those who are into Android’s dark mode are often passionate about that preference.
Unfortunately, for all the progress Android’s made with its dark mode over the years, one core area of the interface remains decidedly light. For some strange reason, Google’s Chrome Android browser doesn’t respect the device-wide, system-level switch for dark mode by default.
Luckily, with about 20 seconds of
effort, you can make an enhancement to Chrome on your phone and/or tablet that’ll empower it to follow your system setting for dark mode on Android and adjust every website you open to match. And best of all? Once you make this change, you’ll never have to think about it again.
ANDROID DARK MODE SET-UP
The trick to this handy enhancement lies within the Chrome Android app’s flags system, which is a place where Google stores under-development or otherwise not-quite-ready-for-primetime features and settings.
It’s incredibly easy to access and adjust, but a word of warning before we approach the virtual gates: this area of your device has a lot of advanced settings, many of which are meant for development purposes. Changing the wrong setting in this area could seriously mess up your set-up and cause all sorts of unfortunate funkiness to occur.
As long as you follow the specific steps below and don’t tinker with anything beyond that, you’ll be fine. Just stay on the prescribed path and avoid messing with anything else unless you know what you’re doing and you’re comfortable with such experimentation and the risks that come with it.
• First, open up the Chrome Android app (fave.co/43cBC3j) on your device.
• Tap your finger to the address bar, then type chrome:flags and hit the Enter key.
• In the search box at the top of the screen that comes up next, type in the word darken.
• See the line labelled ‘Darken websites checkbox in themes setting’? Tap the box beneath that and change it from ‘Default’ to ‘Enabled’.
• Finally, tap the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.
Now that you’ve got the setting enabled, all you’ve got to do is pull up the associated area and then flip the switch you’ve added into your Android Chrome settings. So tap the three-dot menu icon in Chrome’s upper-right corner, then select ‘Settings’ followed by ‘Theme’. You’ll see a new setting to ‘Apply dark theme to sites, when possible’.
Tap it and then open a web page. As long as you’ve got dark mode activated for your device at the system level (which you can typically do via Android’s Quick Settings or within the Display section of your full system settings), you should see the page itself transformed into a glare-free, dark motif.
Just take note: some pages may look better than others in this state. As is frequently the case with dark mode in different contexts, this adaptation is handled solely by software, which means it overrides any design decisions made by the actual site owner and uses an algorithm to determine exactly how colours get adjusted. So the results can vary and occasionally be a bit awkward, but they’ll definitely be dark.