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Comment by h4waii | Hacker News Reader

Will another 10 years go by and there still won't be a dark mode for the app?

As someone who uses the mobile app basically every day, it is absolutely one of the things that bothers me, every single time I use it. That's not a good thing.

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Former Shopify iOS dev here. I pushed SO HARD to get dark mode to be a thing we would do. It's table stakes, IMO, in 2020 and beyond, to support it. We'd get roasted on Twitter, LinkedIn, just about everywhere. HN Comments, even. :)

Got shut down at the highest level. Like, definitively. As in, please don't ask again.

I don't think you'll ever see it as long as Tobi is CEO.

Ugh, i got a bit of pushback on supporting dark mode in my native app, luckily i was starting from scratch and once you show you can pretty much do it by setting up assets correctly and that you can switch modes from the quick menu to test, noone even thinks about it anymore.

They were all coming from a non native mindset though

I'm sure it's only a vocal minority that care

I’ve seen arguments that dark mode is important for accessibility, which seems reasonable to me, and depending on the company might be a dealbreaker.

It’s so ridiculously easy to support though, and i may be a minority, but none of our users ever complain about it being there

Ehh ridiculously easy seems like a stretch. You need to adapt all of your designs for dark mode and if you haven’t thought about it in the past or you don’t have a design system that is easily adaptable in the app you are going to be updating a lot of components and screens.

OK, yeah, you need to think about it first, but it should just be a case that all the colours in your design have alternates. It's mostly a case of differentiating between background and foreground colours. Then you put all your colours in the Assets, only ever used named colours, maybe hardcode some shortcuts, then you never think about it again.

There are a couple of rare cases here and there, eg custom drawing using Core Graphics, where using cgColor won't pick up the change, you have to grab the underlying colour again and force a redraw

What was the rationale?

IIRC, something about opportunity cost or maintenance burden.

There is virtually no maintenance burden if set up correctly, not shouting, i had to demonstrate the fact

If anyone starts a new SwiftUI project, dark mode support is automatic.

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