Facebook begins publicly testing Dark Mode for its official Android app

Both the Facebook app and the Facebook website have both recently underwent a massive redesign. Gone is the blue main color scheme that formerly was a staple of Facebook. Instead, we now have a slightly brighter tone of blue as highlights while the app’s main color is all white. And this, at least in the case of the website and even the Facebook Lite app, was introduced together with a toggle for switching between light and dark mode, with dark mode taking all of the white and turning it dark. Android users were, however, left with an obnoxiously bright app. Well, we bring you good news today: Facebook has started to publicly test Dark Mode for its official Android app.

Facebook is publicly testing Dark Mode!

You asked it, I chatted with Facebook’s @alexvoica about it and here’s a video made in collaboration with Facebook! pic.twitter.com/TGjdTXDxoP

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) October 30, 2020

The announcement was made by Jane Manchun Wong, who normally tweets about unreleased features on many apps (including Facebook), but the tweet was actually made in collaboration with official company sources this time around. It does, however, seem to be a smaller-scale, server-side A/B test at the moment. It doesn’t seem to be available on my end just yet, even after updating to beta version 295.0.0.26.119, and looking at Twitter shows it’s kind of a mixed bag, as some users are reporting it shows up on their end (mostly iOS users as the feature is also rolling out for them) while others are reporting it’s not.

Facebook for Android’s Dark Mode actually surfaced a few months ago. Now when it does show up, it should be available under the “Settings & Privacy” menu as a simple toggle, and will be compatible with Android’s system-wide dark mode available from Android 10 onwards. We’re yet to have an official announcement from Facebook on their Newsroom website.

DARK MODE ON THE FACEBOOK APP! pic.twitter.com/650STgholO

— ֆʟօȶɦʍǟʀʟɛʏ (@QueenxKush) October 28, 2020

Instagram and WhatsApp, and even Messenger, all of them Facebook-owned services, have already gotten dark mode support built into the app, so it’s high time for the Facebook app to also get dark mode. As I said before, both the main website and the Lite app have supported dark mode already for a few months, so it was really just the app that lacked support for it. It’s really good to see app developers support dark mode (even if support comes in this late): as more apps keep pivoting towards whiter and brighter designs, dark themes provide a break for your eyes and are fairly easy to implement, all things considered.

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