Over the years, the Google Play Store has gotten a few theme refreshes that have either elicited passionate or apathetic reactions. It can be a sign of a bigger design trend when Google shakes things up, such asintegrating Material You’s dynamic colors into the app. Back in 2021, whenMaterial Youwas officially unveiled, the store’s design started changing rapidly, getting thepill-shaped search box we’re so used to now. In a slightly less-than-revolutionary move, changes have been made to the app’s dark theme, making it much darker in the process.
Back in August,we reported that Google was testing a nearly-black dark themein place of its softer, more grayish theme it has utilized for a long time. It wasn’t completely black, which is an important distinction due to the number of high-end smartphones using AMOLED displays. An AMOLED screen’s pixels are all powered individually and can, as a whole, display incredibly beautiful pictures with near-perfect contrast. When something on screen is intended to be shown in pure black, then each individual pixel that is supposed to display that color actually shuts off, not only looking better to the user but saving power in the process.
TheGoogle News Telegramchannel was one of the first to report that the theme’s color had gotten darker in recent days. Like its ownerNail Sadykovsays, it’s not completely black, which would have made people with AMOLED display devices like theSamsung Galaxy S23series happy. The change was made server-side, with the activation of the following server-side flag:
MaterialNextSemanticColors_enable_gm3_semantic_colors_phase1
It’s not hard toactivate dark mode on Google Playfor your smartphone. For phones on Android 10 or later, all it takes is a few taps. Things might be slightly different on certain OEM skins, but you’re able to enable the system-wide dark theme on your phone inSettings → Display → Dark theme, and the Play Store should respect this setting automatically. If not, open up the Play Store app, tap your avatar in the top-right corner, then head toSettings → General → Themesto enable dark mode.
Dark mode was first activated across Google apps and software fairly recently. Android 10, released in 2019, was the first version to have any kind of dark theme unified across the entire operating system. It took more than another half-a-year before the Google Play Store ended up getting its dark theme as well. It feels like we’re getting closer and closer to a pure black dark mode, but even without one, as Google pointed out shortly before enabling dark mode in Android,darker gray shades still save power on AMOLED displayssince the pixels don’t have to get as bright as they would to depict a lighter shade.
