Make app's appearance invariable to dark mode

[eber_saj]

Hello everyone.

Is there any way to make my app's appearance invariable to the phone's dark mode system setting? I would like my app to look the same, whether the user is using dark mode or not.

Thanks in advance.

[One]

You can try using themes if you don't want to manually set the colors for every single control.

[eber_saj]

Hi @One .

That's what I am already doing. Now I would like the same theme colors to be applied to the app both in light and dark mode. How can I do that?

[One]

maybe I am confused, but why have a light or dark mode if you want to apply to same colors to both modes anyway? or are you trying to invert the colors?

[timl]

@eber_saj 

If you're referring to the device's dark mode setting (such as Android's dark theme), there's no way to override this as it's a low level device setting.

https://support.google.com/accessibility/android/answer/6151800?hl=en-GB

On my phone, it's possible to add app specific exceptions to the dark theme, and I'm able to add an exception for the Power Apps app. Maybe this is something your users can do.

[eber_saj]

Hey @timl .

Thanks for the reply.

Is there any function I can use inside my app to read whether the user has the system's dark mode enabled?

Because as my app stands right now, I have basically no control of the colors when the user has the phone's dark mode enabled. They change to some random ugly UI that I would like to change and have something better instead.

[timl]

Hi @eber_saj 

Unfortunately, there's no way to detect from Power Apps whether a phone is in dark mode.

I understand why you want to do this, but the comment I would say is that users typically make a consious decision to enable dark mode for accessibilty reasons, to conserve battery life, or for the health benefit of reducing blue light. They do so in the knowledge that they are compromising the appearance of apps.

If it were possible to override the dark mode, we would probably irritate those users more because we're imposing a UI scheme that they didn't want.

[eber_saj]

@timl 

Thanks for the reply.

I can see that. My current problem is that the way PowerApps is automatically adjusting to the system's dark mode is not very consistent. Some components are changing their color to match the dark mode, and some are not. This leads to areas of the app with very low contrast between objects, which is horrible for the user.

If the dark mode adjustment was consistent acroos the whole app, I would be fine with leaving it be. But the way it currently works, I would rather just have no dark mode at all.

For example:

 

 

[timl]

Thanks @eber_saj 

I see what you mean about the low contrast from your screenshots. As it's not possible to detect dark mode, the only option I can think of is to set manually set the colors of the controls with variables (rather than use themes) and to provide a user option to change the color scheme by writing formula to change the variable values.

Perhaps someone else here might be able to chip in with a better suggestion.