App designs have come a long way. Heck, interface designs have come a long way. Your smartphones are now more interactive and intuitive than it could ever be. In the progression of the mobile interface, obviously there were some not-so-good stuff along the way from time to time. Still, the interface that we have today is so intuitive and simple that operating a smartphone can be done by babies even.
We remembered interface designs with bright colours, plenty of whites, with a screen busier than Tokyo’s famous intersection. Those days are quite far gone though. Users prefer simpler designs. They prefer cleaner looking screens, despite having a larger than life physical display. They want as little things as possible on the display but still communicate as much information as before.
Just about a year ago too, there has been another design element that has gotten plenty more popular. It was just a simple colour scheme change that changes the contrast and feel of the interface. That is what people call the Dark Mode.
Dark mode is mainly designed with the thought of using your device in dark conditions. The white colours of your super-bright smartphone displays will really hurt your eyes when you look at in dark conditions. That is simple biology really, so we are not going into that.
The idea of a dark mode stems from the use of e-books. The black backgrounds hurt your eyes less while the whites of the words stand out enough that you can clearly read it. This works when you are the type that reads at night, in your bedroom, before you sleep.
Everything from your Operating System (OS) to Facebook Messenger has a dark theme. Of course, every single person out there is begging for a dark theme for everything else too. One app that have not gone on dark theme yet was WhatsApp. That has changed with the latest WhatsApp app update from your Google Play Store and Apple App Store today.
Once you update the app, either the app just follows your OS theme settings and go on dark mode, if you are in dark mode already. If not, you might want to switch that to dark mode. Or, you can manually switch WhatsApp to dark mode in the app settings. All you need to do is open the app, get into the settings, got to ‘Chats’, and then click on ‘Theme’ to select ‘Dark’, and voila; your WhatsApp is now in ‘night reading’ mode.
What that does is change the white and light grey backdrop of WhatsApp to a near black and dark grey backdrop. That also completely changes the look and feel of WhatsApp. It looks even simpler than before. Mind you, there is no significant interface change except for the colour scheme. We also concur that the ‘Dark’ theme may not be for everyone. But at least this hurts my eyes less when I first open WhatsApp in the morning or at night. Keep in mind though that the ‘Dark’ theme only applies to the mobile app at this time.