Redesigning Touchgram for Dark Mode
It took someone holding up an unreadable phone for me to realise I’d missed something important.
I had a very galling moment during a video chat amongst founders. One of them installed Touchgram and then asked me to explain why he couldn’t use the app — he couldn’t see anything.
I thought he’d run into the typical confusion — people forget that Touchgram is primarily an iMessage extension. The app is there just for settings and linking to the privacy and other policies. Then he sent me a screenshot. Yep, that very one you see at the top of this article.
I was horrified to see that the Touchgram user interface was impossible to read- there was white text on a pale blue background. Then I noticed the outside frame and realised he was doing something I’d never tested — he was using Dark Mode.
Apple introduced Dark Mode in iOS 13 either as an option you can enable all the time or something that activates at night. Many apps ignore it — they set a flag telling the system to continue to display them as if in Light Mode.
Dark mode is not a problem if your entire user interface is specified down to every text style and color. Where it goes horribly wrong is when you have your own light background color, as did Touchgram, but…
