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Gmail App's Dark Mode Finally Completes Rollout on iPhone and iPad
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Well I’ll be—multitasking has been added! I would think that would be the much bigger story than dark mode being added, considering it’s been greatly and unnecessarily handicapping people’s productivity the past five years, since iOS 9.
I was not aware there was a deadline to support multitasking, but of course that’s what it would take to make google add it. And of course google doesn’t mention it in the release notes.
I finally got it on my iPhone but still no dark mode on my iPad. I wonder why the rollout took so long.
After months of delay and inconsistent functionality, the rollout of Google's long-awaited dark mode for Gmail appears to have finally ... <snip>
Ok, maybe I’m missing something. It is 2020 and we celebrate that one can change the color schemes of an APP or OS. Seriously? I get the influence on Apple marketing doing a keynote for every new radio button 🔘 they “launch” as innovation. But since when are engineers following this BS?And why would not the OS implement that properly once and forever, so not every app needs a 6+ month (yeah Google!) effort to do this?
I already posted the solution.
1 - Open the App
2 - Go to Settings, you won’t see the Menu Themes
3 - Exit settings and wait 5 seconds
4 - Go to Home Screen and wait 5 seconds
5 - Close App
6 - Reopen App
This is how it appeared to me on iPhone and 2 iPads pro.
Hope it works for you as well.
Because almost everything Google does with its apps is a server-side update. The Gmail app is still mostly just a glorified web-wrapper, with most of the real assets and code coming from its servers. While this may make some sense for things like scheduled send and confidential mode, it's also applied to other really innocuous things. For example, when Google rolled out swipe gestures a couple of years ago — something else that should be entirely client-side — it still took about a month before everybody could actually see it.
Why dark mode took over six months is beyond me, although at one point Google actually paused it, so they must have been unhappy with the rollout for some reason. Maybe it was a design issue, or maybe it had to do with problems updating the code across all of its servers, but the whole thing was completely stalled for at least a couple of months right in the middle.
Google also enables these things on a per-account basis, which is even sillier. I have three G Suite accounts and a personal Gmail account, and until about a month ago, only one of them had been enabled for Dark Mode (a brand new one that was set up for me in January), however I could use that one to "unlock" Dark Mode for all of them, as long as I logged into it first, before enabling my other accounts. Yet once enabled for that one account, Dark Mode worked fine in Gmail for all of my accounts.
The bottom line is that a Gmail app update never truly delivers new features — Google may advertise those features in its iOS release notes, but the features themselves are delivered from Google's servers, once your account has been lucky enough to get them.
Definitely agree. I'm so sick of A/B/C.... rollouts. FB pulls the same crap. And I still had to restart my iPhone for the Mode Setting to appear.
This is no "tiny" feature. It's not just a matter of reversing colours. Maybe they are not in a rush to support unappreciative users?
Same for me except I restarted instead, and it was dark when I opened GMail the next time.
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The bigger issue isn't coding it. It's the BS tiered rollout crap. At least give the option to everyone at once when it's ready!
I have found that dark mode on third party mail apps obscures parts of some emails but Apple Mail does not. Gmail, Spark, etc, I don’t enable dark mode. Why this is I don’t know.
Please define a "big" or "significant" or "complex" feature to me then. I'm aware it's not just reversing colours. Still, can you elaborate how this would be big or complex? Any super complex maths involved? 🤯
Great finally they get dark and now it functionally is broken. Not getting the unread badge. Toggled it off and on again in Notification Settings and restarted and still no badge. Going back to Outlook. Should have just stuck with it. Outlook has the nice black dark mode anyhow unlike GMails crappy dark gray.
EDIT: The one thing I do like about the actual GMail App is I can search for older emails better. Can never seem to find older ones in other apps.
EDIT: The one thing I do like about the actual GMail App is I can search for older emails better. Can never seem to find older ones in other apps.
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It's been a year. That combined with larger companies generally moving quite slowly (dark mode was very low on the list at my company) and Google probably having more custom code that makes it harder to support such a feature.
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The work itself isn't super complex, but wide in scope if that makes sense because you pretty much have to go through every screen (which can be very time consuming, especially when it comes to content) and verify it's displaying the content correctly. That and in larger companies there can often be inter-team dependencies (e.g. maybe there's a Google iOS core framework team that has not yet finished their work for dark mode because of other priorities so you're a bit stuck as a member of the Gmail team).
In this particular case the rollout appeared to be account based and not really tied to any validation on different devices or anything like that. Why a feature like this would be account based and why it would take so long to go out, especially when Google themselves said it would take a couple of weeks or so to become available for everyone when then initially announced its release, is an interesting question.
Looks like another update was released today. However the issue with jumping to the top by tapping the status bar is still there -- it seems to work fine when you are inside a message, but when you are on the message list screen it doesn't seem to work for some reason.
Thank you for posting this. I was disappointed not to see the Theme option on my new iPad after having dark mode on everything before. Weird how this worked.