Have you considered the need for a darker dark mode on Google Play?

Do you remember back in the day when most of the best phones on the market didn’t have dark modes? The mode, which aims to preserve your eyesight while improving your device’s power consumption (and thus, battery) was so wildly successful that it eventually made its way to basically everything we own.

(Please, shout out below if you have a fridge or washing machine with a dark mode. I’m betting that one exists!)

But there is still an ongoing debate regarding the dark factor of the mode: how dark exactly should it be? Well, I see the sides as follows:

• Aesthetics dictates a lighter tone, around charcoal and gravel-gray, as to reduce eye-strain and improve readability through reducing maximum contrast
• Optimization requires absolute black, the kind that AMOLED displays love, which would improve your device’s battery

Well, Google says: why not both? Or at least, this is how I view the news that Google Play’s dark theme got just a bit darker. It’s not lite-black. It’s not pitch-black. It’s in between. But it’s also just a test for now.



So, after checking the comparison above, you can certainly notice how the image on the right is just a splash darker than the one on the left. Would this change effectively help to cater to both camps?

Technically, yes. Version 37.0.22-29 brings a darker tint, so in theory that should mean a very slight and most likely hardly noticeable improvement in the battery department. That being said, the move to not overexpose things through plastering the background in jet black will certainly please that part of the crowd, which finds high-contrasted areas difficult to view.

So, win-win? Maybe. This change may be just a test or an implementation, which is part of the Big G’s updated design guidance. Something similar did happen to Chrome and YouTube recently, so the latter may very well be the case.