iOS 10’s elusive Dark Mode shown in Settings app

iOS 10 Settings Dark Mode rumor iPhone screenshot 001

Five days ago, iDownloadBlog’s own Andrew O’Hara first wrote about jailbreak developer Andy Wiik‘s discovery of Dark Mode resources buried deep within iOS 10’s Messages app.

During the weekend, Wiik shared a few new screenshots showing a dark mode for the Settings app, running in iOS Simulator, strongly suggesting that these Dark Mode resources may not have been left within iOS 10 code by accident.

Although Apple did add a dark interface mode to tvOS 10 for the fourth-generation Apple TV, this sought-after feature remains officially unavailable in iOS 10.

As I said recently, Apple’s been experimenting with dark iOS interfaces for years now.

The iBooks app includes an automatic dark mode, for example. Safari’s Reader Mode lets you pick a background color, one of which is black, and the iTunes Store app has had black interfaces for TV Shows and Movies for years now.

In iOS 10, the Clock app has been given an all-dark treatment, as show below.

iOS 10 Clock Dark Mode iPhone screenshot 001

All of this is fueling speculation that Apple is laying the groundwork for Dark Mode that some folks think will officially launch alongside OLED iPhones this or next year.

In all likelihood, Dark Mode won’t officially debut until iOS 11.

Because OLED technology lights up individual pixels and doesn’t require backlighting, dark interfaces actually help reduce a display’s power consumption.

This is why the Apple Watch’s interface is mostly dark.

With the traditional LCD technology, backlighting is required whether or not the entire screen is all black. As a consequence, a dark interface on an LCD display doesn’t really make sense from an energy standpoint.

Source: Andrew Wiik