YouTube Goes Dark on Mobile Devices

After introducing a dark theme for YouTube on the web, Google is bringing a dark theme for YouTube to mobile devices.

The company is today rolling out a new dark theme for YouTube on the iPhone, and it’ll be bringing the new dark theme to Android devices sometime soon. The dark theme for YouTube is pretty easy to open: you just need to head over to the app’s settings and enable the Dark Theme toggle.

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YouTube looks much better with the dark theme, and the viewing experience is definitely superior. Although there is no way of making the app automatically switching between the dark and light themes depending on the time of the day, the addition of the new dark theme will be welcomed by many.

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  • gregsedwards

    Premium Member
    13 March, 2018 - 1:18 pm

    <p>Apocalyptic title is needlessly apocalyptic (and a little clickbait-y, if I'm being honest). Cool feature, though. I already use this a lot on my desktop browser and it just makes sense to do on the mobile app as well. Hopefully, this will all be a lot simpler and more consistent with the advent of PWA.</p>

  • Brazbit

    13 March, 2018 - 2:17 pm

    <p>It's about time. I wish every app had this option. It's invaluable for video apps as it makes the content the brightest focal point on the screen rather than the darkest and outshone by ads and comments. </p><p>In general I hate staring at blinding white screens all the time. Doubly so on mobile devices which are frequently used in dark environments. </p><p>I would love to be able to invert web page text and background colors, without inverting the images or changing the interface and general functionality like accessibility options do. Reading mode does a good job with this, but many sites (including this one) block or are incompatible with it so that option is only a partial measure. </p><p>Good on YouTube for making this change and cheers to the other apps and UI designers that are starting to embrace this feature. Fingers crossed that the trend continues. </p>

    • gregsedwards

      Premium Member
      13 March, 2018 - 3:10 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#252797"><em>In reply to Brazbit:</em></a></blockquote><p>Agreed. There should just be a standard 3-way switch in every app that says "light theme, dark theme, system theme."</p>

    • NazmusLabs

      14 March, 2018 - 5:30 pm

      <blockquote><a href="#252797"><em>In reply to Brazbit:</em></a></blockquote><p>It's one of the few innovations from Windows Phone that hasn't yet fully carried over to the other mobile OSes. I really wish Apple brings the Dark mode APIs on iOS. Their standard UI is actually designed pretty well to be able to easily adapt to dark mode. iOS should also borrow the Windows's accent color feature (another Windows Phone innovation) because iOS's design is perfect for accent color implementation. Right now, accent color is defaulted to cyan, with developers able to change it for their particular app. Apple should allow users to change the default accent color to anything we wish, that way, apps not suing custom accent color will adapt automatically with our preferences. That, combined with dark mode would be fantastic.</p>

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