How to enable dark mode on your Samsung Galaxy phone

There are several reasons why you might want to enable dark mode on your Samsung Galaxy smartphone. Perhaps you find it easier on your eyes, or perhaps you want to take advantage of Samsung's OLED screen technology and save some battery life by lighting up fewer pixels. Or maybe you just think it looks cool (it does). I'll show you how easy it is to set your screen to dark mode. Who knows, you may never want to go back!

How to enable dark mode on your Galaxy phone

For this guide, I am going to assume that your device is on Android 10 Q. There is a way to enable a version of dark mode for Galaxy phones on Android 9 Pie, but it is technically not an Android OS-level setting, and thus may not work across all of your apps.

1. Make sure that your device is updated to Android 10.
2. Slide down the notification and settings shade.

3. Depending on you, you've organized your system settings in the pulldown menu, you may need to swipe over a screen to see the Dark mode setting (it has a moon icon).

   Source: Jeramy Johnson / Android Central

4. Tap on Dark mode to turn on system-wide dark mode.

5. Long press on Dark mode to bring up the extended Dark mode settings.

   Source: Jeramy Johnson / Android Central

6. Toggle Turn on as scheduled to activate Dark mode at specific times of the day (say, from sunset to sunrise, or custom).
7. Toggle Apply to wallpaper to have your background match the color temperature of the rest of your apps.

8. Toggle Adaptive color filter to turn on a blue light filter between sunset and sunrise to reduce eye strain. You will have to grant the phone permission to access your location for this to work.

   Source: Jeramy Johnson / Android Central

In my opinion, the quickest way to access Dark mode settings is from the pulldown Notifications/Settings shade. Still, you can also access it by going into the Settings app and tapping on the Display menu.

This system-wide Android 10 Q dark mode support should be accessible on all of the Galaxy S20 line, as well as the Note 10 and S10 lines, Note 9 and S9 lines, and many of the recent A and M series. For older series like the Note 8 and S8 generation, as long as they're running Android 9 Pie and the first version or later of One UI, you'll still have access to Samsung's Nite mode. The steps to enable Nite mode will be the same as outlined above, but you'll look for the words Nite mode instead of Dark mode. Additionally, Nite mode will likely only affect system apps and menus, and may not work across many third-party apps.

Our top equipment picks

If you are looking to upgrade to a new Galaxy phone on Android 10 with at least a few more software cycles, our pick is the Galaxy S20+. While you are rocking the latest and greatest, be mindful of your protective choices with this sustainable S20+ case from Kvadrat.