On World Sight Day, these 5 apps with night mode while help care for your eyes

By Azhar Iqubal

Over the last decade, owing to the increased penetration of smartphones in the country, millenials have become increasingly glued to their mobiles, spending close to three hours a day browsing through various apps on average. The rise of the app culture is definitely a bonus for consumers today as they have access to an aspirational lifestyle, however, on the flip side prolonged exposure to the blue light of the screen causes great strain to one’s eyes.

Therefore to battle this problem, some platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Inshorts have launched a feature called the ‘Dark Mode’. Whatsapp, among India’s most used apps, is also following suit and planning to launch this feature.

Dark mode or night mode is a feature that replaces the usual black-on-white display with white-on-black. It comes in handy at night or in low-light conditions and helps in reducing strain on the user’s eyes.

So this World Sight Day, let’s look for #EyeCareEverywhere and learn how to enable night mode on these five useful everyday apps.

YouTube

An app that lets users watch, like, share, comment and upload their own videos has recently launched its night mode. YouTube’s dark mode provides an easier-on-the-eyes viewing experience. It’s particularly nice when watching videos in the dark. To turn it on, open up the YouTube app and tap on profile photo in the upper right corner. Then go to Settings and choose Dark theme.

Google Maps

The app is helpful in many ways such as navigating routes, real-time traffic updates with ETAs, finding the best places in town and the information needed to get there. Google Maps app has a dark mode too and has three options to choose from—automatic, day and night. To access the dark background interface, tap the three dots on the bottom right corner that appear during the trip, then select Navigation Settings, and tap on the Automatic option under Color Scheme. The automatic mode automatically turns on the night mode when the sun goes down.

Inshorts

The app curates the most significant news items of the day across categories like Politics, Entertainment, Business, Technology, Startups, World, and Sports in just 60 words called a ‘short’. Inshorts facilitates comfortable to read content by activating night mode. To enable this option tap on the content and select the menu icon located on the upper left corner and go to Settings to activate. After activating this option, the screen will shift to a gray color background, which makes the content easy to read. Thus reducing eye strain to a large extent.

Twitter

An app for online news and social networking where users post and interact through messages known as ‘tweets’ restricted to 280 characters. The Twitter app also has a night mode which can be enabled manually by tapping the moon icon on the hamburger menu, or have it turn on and off automatically in accordance with the sunset and sunrise.

Kindle

An app version of Amazon’s popular ebook reading platform which allows to quickly download and read electronic books, magazine, and newspapers on a phone. To turn Kindle’s night mode on, open up an ebook and tap the button Aa. Then simply choose a black background with white text or a sepia background with black text.

Azhar Iqubal is the CEO and co-founder of Inshorts.