This week, Apple started shipping the HomeView, its first display made for the smart home. On the HomeView, there’s one particularly nice feature that I’d love to see make its way to all Apple platforms: Ambient Dark Mode.
On iOS, iPadOS, and macOS today – the only flexibility you have on dark mode is whether or not it automatically switches on towards night time. While this is generally helpful and certainly appreciated, it isn’t super granular. Of course, you can adjust the time when it switches, but generally speaking its just a one time toggle.
HomeView offers a new dark mode option
With HomeView, you can enable ambient dark mode. In display settings, once you enable automatic dark mode, there’s the usual two settings you’d see on other Apple platforms: sunrise to sunset, as well as a custom schedule. HomeView takes it a step further with ambient mode, where the ambient light sensor determines whether or not you should be in light or dark mode.
Of course, a sunrise to sunset schedule generally works for most cases. However, if you’re up late at night with your lights turned on, you still might prefer light mode in an instance where macOS would generally be in dark mode. Similarly, if you wake up later in the day with your curtains shut, at say 11am, you might not want to immediately see light mode on your phone the second you open your eyes.
There are tons of good reasons for why someone would prefer ambient light-based automatic light and dark mode switching. HomeView software is the first Apple platform to enable this, and I’d love to see it come to iPhone, iPad, and Mac starting next year with OS 28.
Some of my favorite Apple accessory recommendations:
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