The background color of applications and websites never used to be that big of a deal since most smartphones used LCD screens. As OLED technology matured though, it was able to shake off the rampant burn-in complaints that most people had with it. Now, most flagship smartphones are shipping with OLED screens and that means apps and websites which offer a Dark Mode option can help users save some battery. Microsoft's Outlook application actually just had images of its Dark Mode feature leaked and now beta users of OneNote are seeing the new feature in the app.

We've known about the battery life benefits when we limit the amount of white being displayed on these OLED screens. Sadly, it's taken Google (and many application developers) years before they decided to implement a Dark Mode feature. There are a number of reasons why companies and developers have ignored the Dark Mode feature for as long as they have. Whatever the reason, I'm glad that it's been getting more attention as of late because many of us have had to resort to using Substratum to get a dark theme for our favorite apps.

Thanks to the leak from yesterday, we now know that Microsoft is focused on adding Dark Mode options to a number of its Android applications. It's unclear how many will get the feature but we've seen the leaked image of Outlook and now we have some images of the latest Microsoft OneNote beta.

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The update appears to be happening via a server-side switch though, so there isn't a new version of the app that you can sideload. It's smart that Microsoft is keeping this limited to a select number of beta testers because they haven't quite nailed the design yet. As you can see, some of the text is black and it's being put on top of a dark color background, which is making it difficult to read. There also doesn't seem to be a toggle for the feature either as Dark Mode will automatically be applied if the global Dark Mode feature has been enabled.


Source 1: Windows Latest | Source 2: ARK