Android 15 will let you force apps to go dark, even if they don’t support it
Even if your favorite apps don’t have a true dark theme, Android 15 may let you force it on them.
JoriPress
- Android 15 may introduce a new “make all apps dark” feature that forces apps without a native dark theme to go dark.
- Android 10 introduced support for a system-wide dark mode, but apps still need to have their own dark theme.
- Some apps still don’t have a dark theme, like Fitbit or Amazon Shopping.
People seem to really, really love enabling dark mode in apps. In fact, when we ran a poll back in early 2020 to find out how many of our readers use dark mode on their phones, an overwhelming 81.9% of respondents said they enable it wherever it’s available. Google introduced support for a system-wide dark mode toggle back in Android 10, and today, most popular apps have a dark theme that follows the system toggle. However, there are still a few holdouts that haven’t added a dark theme. Thanks to a new feature in the upcoming Android 15 update, you’ll be able to force these apps to go dark, even if they don’t have a built-in dark theme.
In the Android 14 QPR2 Beta 2 update released in January, Google hid a new “make all apps dark” toggle under Settings > Accessibility > Color and motion. This toggle, which wasn’t visible by default at the time (and still isn’t as of the latest Android 15 Beta 1.2 update released earlier today), seems similar to the existing “override force-dark” toggle that’s been under Settings > System > Developer options since Android 10. However, during our testing, we found that “make all apps dark” works in more apps than “override force-dark”, suggesting that the existing developer opt-out no longer works and that the underlying force-dark algorithm is different.
