Hacker News Reader

Comment by gnicholas | Hacker News Reader

After Apple announced Dark Mode, I called up the dev who builds my startup's iOS app. We already had some dark-mode-like features in the app, but with this I was excited to make it global. Then he told me that if we want our iOS 13 users to be able to have a Dark Mode that is tied to the iOS 13 flag, users who are on iOS 12 or earlier. This killed the idea for me — I don't want to force people to upgrade from 12 to 13 (which has many bugs still), and I certainly don't want to cause problems for people with devices that are not supported by iOS 13.

I really wish Apple made it possible to give access to this feature without cutting off a significant portion of iOS users (including pretty much all schools, which are critical for us). Existing users can't upgrade, but new purchasers wouldn't be able to download at all.

View on HN

I don't think this is true... Apps below iOS 13 won't be able to use the new system-defined UIColors, yes, and users below iOS 13 can't change to the dark-mode using a switch in the Control Center, yes.

But you've been able to change the "user interface style" for view controllers since iOS 12 [0]. And you've been able to add UIColors to asset catalogs that change depending on that setting since iOS 12 as well.

I'll be honest, I haven't tried this myself. But either this works or Apple's documentation is wrong.

[0]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/uiuserinterf...

I sure hope you're right! It would seem pretty crazy to be forced to choose between iOS 12-and-below and Dark Mode. Thanks for the pointer!

Depending on the target user for your app, you may see 90%+ on iOS 13 soon, anyway.

Some apps (Narwhal) give the option to have a dark mode for iOS 12 as well as a UI switch to "Sync night and iOS dark Mode". This is nice because you could give it to pre-ios13 apps, while allowing for ios13+ to have it permanently dark or sync with the global ios setting.

I'm confused.

Building out a dark mode in your app has been readily possible for a long time now. You could've done it years ago.

But you like the idea of it being "global"? You mean, integrated with the rest of the OS, so that when the OS is in dark mode, your app is in dark mode? And you somehow want Apple to introduce that feature without introducing a new version of the OS? How does that work?

Yes, global in the sense that it ties in with the OS flag. I understand that they have to release a new version of the OS to make that possible, but the understanding conveyed by my dev (who may be mistaken) is that we cannot enable this feature without making the app incompatible with prior versions of the OS. Others have indicated that we can in fact do this, which would be great. I've run into enough odd upgrade-forcing-functions recently on iOS/MacOS that what my dev reported seemed believable (if disappointing).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com