Opinion: Google’s “Dark Mode” efforts are taking too long and are full of inconsistencies

Over the past few years, Google has completely stripped its web-based services and apps of most of their color in favor of a minimalistic, white theme. At the time that it occurred across the board, the company had not yet made clear its intentions to add a universal dark mode toggle for the web. As time passed, it became clear that some larger plan was at play than it simply attempting to make its design language as boring as possible. Eventually, this Material Design grew on me and others, and while it’s still difficult to differentiate some elements on-screen due to their lack of separation (aside from all of that white space!), it’s ultimately appealing in its own rite.

Not long ago, Google began to implement a dark theme toggle both on the web and on Chrome OS to make it easier to switch between standard eye-burning white and low-light modes for its services. However, while web apps like Google News, Youtube, and Chat have gone headfirst into dark mode implementations, some of the most important and most utilized services remain untouched by the dark side as we enter 2022.

First, I want to point out that Google Keep and Search have a dark mode, but what’s crazy to me is that they must be toggled manually. That’s right, every time you swap your Desktop or Chromebook between light and dark themes using the system settings, you must manually visit the cogwheel icon at the top-right of these two services and select the option to change the theming by yourself.

The worst offenders are Gmail, Google Calendar, and Photos. I’m not kidding when I say that these three web apps are completely devoid of any dark theming – go and check for yourself. You’d think that Google would implement them on the apps that are most used in business and more visually utilized before the ones they actually chose to half-bake a dark mode into. Despite this, using Gmail or Calendar at night is absolutely terrible. The best you can hope for is either to turn on your night light and crank your device’s brightness way down or to deal with it until it’s rectified.

Most of these services, including Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, Gmail, Calendar, and most everything else have a dark mode on Android and iOS, but that effort has not been translated over to the web, even after extended periods of time. It baffles me to think that while web apps are the future, Google has not dedicated enough effort or time to unify the experience for its ecosystem across devices – at least, that’s my honest opinion.

With the work-from-home culture permeating our society on a near-global scale, dark mode is not just a convenience anymore. In my opinion, such a feature should be bumped up to high priority across all companies. I dare say that many smaller companies have taken the matter much more seriously than Google, and while they’ve fully implemented it across the board, the tech giant continues to move at a snail’s pace while it places more trivial features ahead of the pack for…whatever reason.

To bridge the gap in these experiences until the company adds an official dark mode, users can take advantage of any number of Dark Mode extensions on the Chrome Web Store. A few examples include Night Eye and Dark Reader, but so long as you trust the developer and they meet Google’s privacy seal of approval requirements, you can branch out and try some others.

To be absolutely fair, Dark Mode is still a work-in-progress, and the pandemic certainly seemed to slow the development of the feature, especially on Chrome OS. There’s also the matter of Material You development ramping up, potentially in its place, as evidenced by the inconsistencies on Chromebooks right now. Still, the lack of unity in the efforts here are becoming extremely noticeable. Add to that the fact that Youtube Music remains stuck in dark mode and seems to have no desire to add a light mode like its predecessor, Google Play Music, and I think you can begin to see how jarring jumping between apps and web apps on your devices can be over time.

It’s probably not entirely right for me to call this all out since I don’t know each of the factors that go into extensively developing and testing it across the web and mobile, but speaking as an avid user of Google services, I’m beginning to notice that the company’s efforts are taking forever and it’s just frustrating. If you share my experience with all of this, let me know in the comments below. I hope that a fire is lit under Google to place this at the top of the to-do list, but I’m not going to hold my breath.