Dark Mode May Finally Be Coming to Facebook on Your iPhone

While most developers have been pretty quick to embrace Dark Mode since the release of iOS 13, even if some of them have rolled it out in their own quirky ways, one of the most-used iOS apps out there, Facebook, has ironically showed no progress nor even any real interest in embracing its dark side.

This is even more mysterious when you consider that Facebook rolled out its own dark mode in Facebook Messenger over a year ago, originally as a hidden feature before bringing it to the mainstream a few months later. This arrived even before iOS 13 was released, showing that Facebook was serious about going dark in its messaging app, but despite many redesigns of the main Facebook experience over the years, it’s never shown any desire to add a dark mode there.

However, almost seven months after dark mode first came to iOS 13, it looks like Facebook may finally be getting with the program, with new code and images found in the latest version of the Facebook app.

First discovered by WABetaInfo, the new dark mode appears to be more of a grayscale theme rather than the deep blacks that are more suited to the modern iPhone OLED screens, and more typical of iOS 13’s native dark mode apps. 9to5Mac was also able to enable the new dark mode, and shared some screenshots of their own, also noting the grayscale design with white accents for logos and icons.

This is likely going to be a bit of controversial design choice as not only does the true black presentation arguably look much nicer, but it also saves power on OLED screens, since fully black pixels don’t need to be switched on.

Of course, it’s also very possible that the design may change, as this hasn’t even been officially announced yet, much less rolled out to beta testers, and there are still some inconsistencies in the screenshots as well. According to 9to5Mac, once the feature is released it will also be possible to manually enable or disable the Facebook Dark Mode via the in-app settings pane, but it will also allow the user to choose an “auto” mode that will tie it to the systemwide iOS Dark Mode, meaning it will follow your schedule as well. There doesn’t yet appear to be a way to schedule Dark Mode in the Facebook app itself, however.

While nobody has found any evidence of it yet, it’s also possible Facebook could be planning a separate true black Dark Mode in addition to the greyscale option. While Apple embraces true black throughout the iOS 13 user interface, including within its first-party apps, there are a number of third-party apps that offer the user a choice in this regard, so Facebook would be far from alone if it chose to go down this road.

There’s no timeline on when we may actually see the new Dark Mode in Facebook, although the company did start slowly rolling out a new dark mode on its main web interface last month, so we’d expect that the iOS update shouldn’t be far behind. However, since Facebook rolls out new designs on the back-end, much like Google does, it’s also likely that not everybody will see it at the same time.

[The information provided in this article has NOT been confirmed by Apple and may be speculation. Provided details may not be factual. Take all rumors, tech or otherwise, with a grain of salt.]