Why You Probably Should Be Using Dark Mode On Your iPhone

Dark Mode for iOS was introduced by Apple in 2019 as part of the main iOS and iPadOS 13 release. The long-awaited feature makes using an iPhone or iPad at night a more comfortable experience by making the white elements on the screen black, significantly reducing the amount of blinding light that is emitted from your iPhone. The feature is also available on Macs running macOS 10.14 Mojave or later or Apple TVs running tvOS 10 or later, as well.

In addition to using it at night, many people have opted to use Dark Mode all day, every day, simply for the coolness factor — though, of course, there are practical benefits from using Dark Mode, including increased battery life on iPhone models with an OLED display (pretty much all of the latest iPhones, excluding the iPhone SE), as explained by Apple. Not everyone will like the way Dark Mode looks, and not everyone will enable Dark Mode for the same reasons. Some users simply like the darker aesthetic, but even if you're not one of them, there are still a couple of good reasons to consider turning the feature on.

If you have an iPhone 12 or later (excluding the iPhone SE), iPhone 11 Pro or iPhone 11 Pro Max, iPhone Xs or Xs Max, or iPhone X, turning on Dark Mode may increase your daily battery life, according to Apple, depending on which apps you use frequently. For the most part, you should see a battery boost unless you're spending all day playing games on your iPhone.

As Apple explains in its support document, those iPhones feature OLED displays, which light up each pixel individually. What this means is that when the display is showing black or darker colors, the iPhone will drain significantly less from the battery as opposed to white or very bright colors. Of course, when you turn on Dark mode, the bulk of the screen will display darker colors. If you spend most of your time responding to texts or emails, browsing the web, or looking at social media, turning on Dark mode will increase your battery life, even if only a little bit.

There's a reason why apps like the Camera on your iPhone or Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on the Mac only offer dark interfaces with no option of changing it to light mode: it helps you focus (via Apple). The same applies when you use Dark Mode on your iPhone. The window chrome and overall interface start to fade into the background and that puts the focus on the content at hand. 

That's also why movies, TV shows, photos, and videos use blackletter and pillar boxing. This isn't to say using Dark Mode will solve potential focus issues while using your iPhone, but it should help you stay focused on the content at hand as opposed to the brighter, vibrant Light interface. If you want to take it a step further, you could also enable Focus mode, which should help reduce the number of notifications that appear on your iPhone.