It seems like the most requested feature for any app nowadays is to have a dark mode option as more and more users want to have less white light on their phones when needed. Facebook’s Messenger app is no exemption and while we’ve seen a preview of it through social media teardown expert Jane Manchun Wong, we haven’t really seen it in “real life”. Well according to Jane herself, it looks like Facebook is now rolling it out to selected users, although it’s still very much in early testing mode and cannot be triggered manually just yet.
According to Jane on her Twitter account, because of a lot of “external nagging”, Facebook wanted to have a public beta of the feature to see how people in the real world will react to it. Right now only a few users in a few regions are able to see the dark mode activated in their Messenger app. There is no list of countries right now so you’ll know if you’re part of it if you go to the Me section on your app and you see a new Dark Mode setting, which of course you can choose to toggle on or not.
There is a warning that pops up saying that they’re still putting the “finishing touches” on the dark mode so it will not yet appear everywhere in your app. So it also means you have to be careful when using it in the dark as it may suddenly blind you when you get to sections that still have all that bright, white space.
Since we can’t see the actual dark mode just yet, we’ll rely on screenshots that Jane previously tweeted out and hoping that it will still be what’s rolling out or even a better version of it. Obviously, all the stark white backgrounds are now replaced with black and the text has been inverted from black to white. Other elements like the search bar are still gray but they will become a darker version.
Hopefully, this test is a quick one so we can finally see the stable version roll out to all users. This can be either good or bad news for those who like messaging late into the night, depending on what your conviction is about losing sleep because of your phone.
Facebook Messenger, seemingly due to prolonged external nagging, has started public testing Dark Mode in certain countries
They have put up a fair warning that Dark Mode isn't everywhere yet so don't complain when some UI burns your eyes off
previously: https://t.co/9fCvbYXS5Z pic.twitter.com/wF3w5hsHfh
— Jane "not Facebook Employee" Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) December 31, 2018
