- I'm Andru Edwards and you're watching Gear Live.
(upbeat music)
Apple introduced iOS 13 at it's WWDC 2019 developers event
and one of the features shown is one that many iPhone
users have been begging for for years, dark mode.
That's right.
Beginning with iOS 13, iOS users will have the option
of enabling a dark color scheme
that works system wide and across all native apps.
In this video we take a look at how it works
and how it looks to see just how much
of a difference it makes.
What is going on tech squad, Andru Edwards here,
Editor-in-chief at GearLive.com.
As I mentioned, today I'm giving you a look
at iOS 13's dark mode.
This is a feature that a lot of people
have been asking for, a lot of people have been begging for.
And there's been a lot of hype behind it
especially when the rumor mill started going
saying that iOS 13 would be getting a dark mode.
Now I don't know why people are so enamored with this.
I didn't care either way whether a dark mode came or not
but a lot of you guys did.
In fact I put up a poll on YouTube asking which feature
you guys cared about most and it was iOS 13's dark mode.
I've got iOS 13 running here on an iPhone XR.
Now aside from this dark mode video I will be doing
more videos showing you some of
the biggest features of iOS 13.
So if you don't wanna miss those,
be sure to hit that subscribe button down below.
Now let's jump in to dark mode.
All right first things first, what even is dark mode?
Basically dark mode adjusts the background
and foreground colors to make content stand out
by changing the bright white background into dark blacks
and grays and the text from black over to white.
So like I said, iPhone XR here.
Let's go ahead and enable dark mode.
There's two ways to do this.
First we're gonna go into Settings here
and from Settings we're going to go into
Display & Brightness and as you can see there,
we've got dark mode enabled.
So here's light mode, there's dark mode.
Light, dark.
You can see right way the differences.
You've got the pale blue with white when you're
in light mode and then it switches over to black and gray.
So that's one way you can enable and disable dark mode.
There's another way you can do it as well
and that is from the control center.
So you swipe down from the top right here on a XR
and we're going to long press on the brightness control.
As you can see on the bottom left, appearance is dark.
You can tap on that and then your appearance
will change over to light.
So you just switch between dark and light right there
in the control center and that's how you manually enable it
but there's also a way to automatically
enable dark mode as well.
So let's jump back in to the Settings app here.
As you can see right beneath the appearance section
where you can choose light or dark,
there's an automatic option.
So we can tap on that to turn it on
and you can see the options here.
So the option that it's currently set on
is light until sunset so that means it'll automatically
determine where you are using your GPS location
and it'll figure out when sunset is for you
and then when sunset occurs, it'll automatically
switch over to dark mode and then when the sun comes
back up, switch back to light mode.
The other option you can tap on it
and have a custom schedule where you just tell it
when you want light and dark modes to change.
So I'm gonna head back out of here
and turn off automatic so I can easily
switch back and forth for the purposes of this video.
But I think what I will do is probably leave it
on the sunset mode just to see the difference going forward.
Now one thing that dark mode does do
is it can also effect the look of your wallpaper.
So I'm actually gonna go into settings here
and switch my wallpaper over to one of the ones
that is supported by dark mode.
So here we go, we can go into stills here
and you can see these first four with the little icon
on the bottom right, that's the dark mode light mode icon,
those four will switch automatically
and you can kinda see looking at each of those
wallpapers on the left hand side and the right hand side
what they look like in light and dark modes.
So let's switch to this one here.
I'm gonna set that and let's just
set that to the home screen.
It crashed.
I mean we are on an iOS beta but it did crash.
Now let's see.
If I go into the home screen did it take?
Yes it did, so the home screen did take.
Now here you can see on the home screen
the orange, the purples, the pink, the pinkish
and then the background is white.
If we switch that up here back into dark mode
as you will see, background is now dark.
So pretty cool even on your home screen
you have some differences there.
Also you can see the color of the dock itself
and the color of the widgets, the widgets are all dark.
If we switch it up back to light,
you'll see the widgets have
a lighter background color there.
So that's one difference there between light and dark mode.
Now the apps also can support light or dark.
All of Apple's native apps
or most of Apple's native apps support dark mode right now.
Things like weather don't.
So if we go into weather it's gonna have
the same background that you're used to in weather
'cause daytime you're gonna have the bright blue.
If it's nighttime you'll have
that darker background in weather.
But let's say we went into something like News.
Here you can see as we scroll through News,
dark background right there.
If we switch over to News+, there's your magazines,
dark black background with gray accents.
If we were to switch that up right now,
now we've got the white background there as you see.
Let's switch over to another app.
Now we're back in light mode right now.
Go into Calendar.
Calendar, it's usually a pretty bright app.
If you open up calendar you've got basically
a bunch of white staring you in the face.
Now you can switch that up.
Definitely nicer if you're in a dark environment.
Now you've got a dark looking calendar.
Apple Music as you know it today, here it is.
So there you go, you're scrolling through,
everything is nice and bright with the exception obviously
of the album art that's gonna maintain
whatever color it had in the first place.
But if we switch it over to dark mode,
now you get Apple Music nice and dark.
And again I can see why some people would prefer
dark mode I just personally haven't been clamoring
for it to be a big feature that I absolutely
need to have and can't wait till it shows up on my phone.
I really don't care either way.
Some people do care though.
They care because if you have an OLED iPhone,
so an iPhone X, XS or XS Max
or obviously one of the new ones that are coming as well,
iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Max, black backgrounds
do end up saving some battery.
Apple did not go into this, it didn't give any promises
on battery savings that you could expect,
'cause it's negligible, but on an OLED display
where you have a black background,
any area that is pure black,
those pixels are turned completely off.
Here this is an iPhone XR LCD,
so when you see black on this screen
there's still a backlight that's on behind that.
So you're not really getting battery savings
on a XR but on an OLED each individual pixel
is controlled individually and so if it's pure black,
those pixels get to be turned off
which means those pixels aren't using any power.
So I can definitely see why some people
are excited about some battery savings on dark mode as well.
Let's head into one of Apple's other new apps.
We've got TV here.
One of their big apps, the TV app as we all know.
If you've been following Apple news lately
they're making a huge push into TV services.
Here's your TV app.
If you go in and switch it over to dark mode,
you get not a lot of dark mode in the TV app.
So the background of the TV app,
where you see the content, is still pretty bright
and what's changed is across the top where it says Watch Now
and across the bottom navigation bar is a translucent black.
If we switch that back up you'll see the difference here.
Now the top and bottom are white and light.
So not a lot of difference when you go into
the TV app for dark mode but that's gonna be something
you have to expect going forward.
Dark mode isn't just for Apple's apps.
Developers will be able to add dark mode to their apps
as well but everyone's gonna do it differently
and everyone's gonna do it to varying degrees of darkness.
Let's go into Settings real quick.
Let me just tap on Settings here.
So you go into Settings, you get right there, dark black.
This is what an optimized dark mode app
should look like in my opinion.
So I have some contrast there, not just pure black
because having varying contrasting elements
on the screen is a little easier on the eyes
than just pure black and pure white.
Here's the app store dark mode here.
As you can see, still again you have some elements
that are gonna be bright at least on the Today page
but as you go through and look at different apps
that you can download, things are looking nice and dark.
Here's a preview of Apple Arcade by the way.
Switch this over to light mode
and it's exactly what you'd expect.
Everything is now bright white.
Oh and by the way if you're wondering if the new iPad OS
supports dark mode, yes it does.
Here you can see the home screen, swipe up
and we are in dark mode here.
You can see the background of the elements
over on the left hand side and then going into
apps like Apple Music, same thing,
nice and dark background there as well.
Same thing here, dark Calender, dark App Store, et cetera.
Now I wanna hear from you guys.
What do you think of dark mode?
Have you already downloaded the iOS 13 beta
specifically because you wanted to try dark mode?
Are you excited for it?
Are you like me where it doesn't really matter,
you can take it or leave it?
Let me know down in the comments below.
I'll meet you there for further discussion.
And if you have any questions about dark mode
or you have other things you wanna see
about iOS 13, leave those down in the comments below
and that'll tell me what you guys wanna know about
and inform me of what videos I should be making next.
Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss 'em
and if you're really curious, hit that bell icon
so you get notified when those new videos drop.
Now speaking of Apple, if you wanna see my favorite
HomeKit devices, I did a video recently giving you a look
at five great devices that work with Apple's HomeKit.
I'll leave a card up here as well as a link down in the
description below if you wanna check that one out.
Until next time, thanks so much for watching.
As always guys, I appreciate your support.
I'm Andru Edwards and I will catch you in the next video.
(upbeat music)