What does "darken colors" do?

Makes your NC and CC opaque on the i4S and onwards. Basically, as far as I know, there aren't any other changes.

Edit: I'm on 7.0.4, if you mean the new option on 7.1, I don't know.

 

From what I remember (I don't have the beta) it changes the color of the keyboard to dark. Hopefully this will also enable dark themes too

 

My keyboard stays the same on beta 2 with 'darken colors' activated. (I think the darker keyboard was removed from beta 1 to beta 2- could be wrong though.)

I honestly don't know what it does right off the bat yet anything to take the white glare away is solid in my book.

 

It darkens the text on the buttons like cancel or back, if is very slight. Just watch the control text in the up in the right area when you toggle the switch. This is only in 7.1. In beta 2 the dark keyboard was removed.

 

It darkens all the controls in apps essentially, in the bottom and top usually--like even the icons at the bottom if Safari or Facebook or Twitter apps used to control and navigate the app will be darker. It's nothing really crazy, but still fairly noticeable. If you look at the navigation "buttons" in the Notes app for example, where the yellow color is normally harder to make out it looks much nicer with the darken colors option enabled.

 

You're confusing Darken Colors with "Reduce Transparency" on iOS 7.1 , or Increase Contrast on iOS 7.0.4.

 

that dark keyboard option was a fluke. It's been removed and is not present in 7.1 Beta 2.

 

I don't think we can necessarily say it was a fluke, just something that was there in iOS 7 beta 1 and isn't there in beta 2 (without really knowing the reasons why it was there earlier, why it's not there now, and whether or not it might be there in some form in the future.

 

Well, if the intention was for it not to be there and it did appear that qualifies as a fluke no?

 

If that's the case, then, yes, it can be described like that. However, at least so far, we don't really know whether or not that's the case.

 

Honestly, the first time I saw that option the first thing that came to mind was that it wasn't Apple-like to do something like that.

 

It is similar to the reduce transparency option. It is an Accessibility feature that helps people see the interface better, so I would say it qualifies as Apple-like.