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Comment by LeicaLatte | Hacker News Reader

Legitimizing smartphone addiction is the main reason why Apple will never put a dark mode in iOS. Atleast I hope they don't. It has never been a personal problem (I am carrying my own bunch of bad habits) but I hate watching friends, partners constantly checking their phones in the night.

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What do you mean by 'dark mode'?

I turned my screen black and white, which supposedly lessens the addictiveness. You can also invert the colors for cool matrix like effect... if you are into 90's Winamp Themes.

Modern Android has a f.lux-like effect where it changes the colors on your screen to be warmer so they don't affect your sleep as much. I assume that's what he means by 'dark mode' (it's 'night mode').

iOS has something similar - called 'Night Shift'. I think he's talking about having a theme that is a dark background rather than a light/white one, though.

Yes a lot of apps provide a night/dark mode as an in app purchase. Convenient, yes. Addicting, yes++.

You mentioned Night Shift and I think it actually is a great compromise.

Where is the setting? I have Nexus 5x and I remember that there was night mode, but it was never exposed in settings. It was only available on 7.0.

We could have said the same thing about facial recognition technology back in 2011 when Android debuted Face Unlock. Here we are, 6+ years later and Apple introduces its Face ID technology which does the same thing. Just give them time, they have a finite number of paid engineers and they're competing against an ever-growing pool of unpaid open source enthusiasts that enjoy working on Android.

The bigger problem for Apple here is users. A huge number of addicts have been asking for a dark mode in iOS for quite some time. If enough people ask for feature X enough number of times, it is hard for a public company like Apple to resist. I mean it is so easy to at tim or at federighi and get such features these days.

On iOS, press and hold on the brightness slider. It'll go full screen with a "Night Shift" option. And "General -> Accessibility -> Accessibility Shortcut" lets you bind triple-click to various color shift filters (I've recently been using my phone in black & white to try to make it less visually interesting)

I think they just deployed a "smart inverted mode" that inverts the colours of everything except images/videos.

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