Skip to main content

How to turn on Dark theme in Android 10

Save battery life and your eyes with Android's dark mode

Android 10 Q dark theme in Photos app
Simon Hill/Digital Trends

Are you suffering from headaches or difficulty sleeping at night? The blue light from your phone and other electronic devices may be to blame. Thankfully, dark mode can help eliminate this blue light while also helping you to conserve your phone’s precious battery life.

So, how can you start using dark mode today to improve your sleep and eliminate headaches? Read on, and we’ll show you everything you need to know about enabling dark mode on your Android device.

How to turn on dark mode in Android 10

It’s very easy to turn on dark mode. Here’s how:

  • Go to Settings > Display > Dark Theme and toggle it on.

If you have Android 9.0 Pie, you’ll get a taste of dark mode, but be warned, most things still have white backgrounds. The dark mode only seems to impact the notification shade and the app drawer. To give your peepers a real treat, you need to upgrade to Android 10, but only a select group of phones are currently eligible.

When you switch on the dark theme in Android 10 you’ll find that certain supported apps will also switch to the dark side. The list was initially limited, but it’s growing fast. In addition to the notification shade and app drawer, it changes the backgrounds of all the settings menus and also of apps like Phone, Contacts, Google Photos, Chrome, Google Feed, YouTube, Google Fit, Google Drive, Google Keep, Google Pay, and a few others. We expect more apps are working their way toward compatibility with dark mode and should be a part of it very soon.

Ideally, developers will create dark themes of their own to fit in with dark mode, but Google has also included a “Force Dark” option for developers which automatically converts light backgrounds to darker tones.

How to turn off dark mode

It’s easy to turn off dark mode if you don’t like it.

  • Go to Settings > Display and toggle off Dark Theme.

We’d like to see an option to schedule dark mode, as you can with Night Light, perhaps as part of the Wind Down feature.

Does dark mode save battery life?

There was a session at Google I/O that addressed this idea of dark mode saving battery life, particularly with OLED screens. When pixels are lit individually, as with OLED displays, dark pixels are effectively off, and so dark backgrounds use less battery. According to the I/O session, Android 10’s dark theme can reduce battery consumption in some apps by up to 60%. That’s a major potential improvement.

Dark theme is going to be a standard part of the battery saving mode because of this potential power saving. If you’re unable to install Android 10 right now, keep an eye on our to guide to when your phone will get Android 10.

Editors' Recommendations

Simon Hill
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Simon Hill is an experienced technology journalist and editor who loves all things tech. He is currently the Associate Mobile…
The best game controllers for Android phones and tablets in 2022
Razer Raiju Mobile Games Controller with a smartphone attached, on a table in a sitting room

Long gone are the days when Tetris clones, Farmville knockoffs, and Pac-Man look-alikes populated much of Android's burgeoning Google Play Store. Now, Google's operating system boasts a diverse games library that rivals that of some home consoles. Call of Duty: Mobile, Diablo Immortal, and Genshin Impact are the cream of the current mix's crop — a list that seems to grow longer every day. But if you game on your phone, you may need one of the best Android game controllers.

Not all titles work equally well with touchscreens. Few triple-A Android games actually require third-party peripherals, but there are plenty of remastered titles designed with a controller in mind that respond much better to physical buttons. As anyone who has roamed the streets of Vice City or the hallways of Croft Manor can tell you, analog joysticks, D-pads, buttons, and triggers deliver infinitely more precision than big, meaty fingers on greasy smartphone glass.

Read more
The best Android VPN in 2022
best vpns for android

You're not being paranoid if strangers really are snooping for your sensitive online information. There's a good reason for wanting to shield your location and personal data from prying eyes and nosy corporations, especially since the U.S. government now allows your ISP to sell anonymized user data to third parties. A virtual private network or VPN can put a stop to that nefarious activity by letting you camouflage yourself on the internet. A VPN lets your data flow through an encrypted tunnel to a VPN server, so anyone monitoring your connection sees unintelligible data -- the VPN server's IP address instead of your device.

However, not all Android VPN apps are of equal quality and trustworthiness. In choosing a VPN, consider the business models of VPN companies, especially those offering their services for free. Make sure you understand their privacy policies before signing on. We've identified all the options for the best VPN for Android you can install today, and all of them support the OpenVPN protocol -- the most secure option for Android.
NordVPN

Read more
The best 360-degree camera apps for iOS and Android
360-degree-camera-app

Today's smartphones have succeeded in making amateur photographers of most of us. But as smartphone photography became ubiquitous, a more intriguing version of instant photography came into vogue -- the 360-degree spherical panorama. A 360-degree photo lets you observe a scene in any direction from a single point of view and smartphone apps make it incredibly easy to accomplish, as you don't have to do anything except use a specialized app and move your smartphone around to capture and view a scene.

Before modern smartphones, the only way you could capture a genuine spherical panorama was to use a special camera designed for the task and employ stitching software to bind multiple shots together. You can still do that, but today's photo apps make it possible not only to shoot 360-degree images, videos, and panos, but to instantly share them privately or via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Here are some of the best 360-degree camera apps currently available for iOS and Android.
Google Street View

Read more