This week, Apple began shipping HomeView, its first display made for the smart home. On HomeView, there’s one particularly cool feature that I’d like to see come to all Apple platforms: Ambient Dark mode.
On iOS, iPadOS, and macOS today, the only flexibility you have with dark mode is whether or not it automatically turns on at night. While this is generally useful and certainly appreciated, it’s not super granular. Of course, you can adjust the time it switches, but in general it’s just a one-time switch.
HomeView offers a new dark mode option
With HomeView, you can enable ambient dark mode. In the display settings, once auto dark mode is enabled, there are the usual two settings you’d see on other Apple platforms: dawn to dusk, plus 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 dawn to dusk schedule generally works for most cases. However, if you’re up late at night with the lights on, you may still prefer light mode in a case where macOS would generally be in dark mode. Likewise, if you wake up later in the day with the curtains closed, say at 11, you may not want to immediately see the light mode on your phone the moment you open your eyes.
There are tons of good reasons why someone would prefer automatic switching to light and dark modes based on ambient light. HomeView software is the first Apple platform to allow this functionality, 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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