Dark mode arrives on Messenger

Ending months of testing in selected countries, social media giant Facebook has finally rolled out a dark mode on Messenger. The feature can’t be turned on directly and here is the trick to activate it.

Messenger users need to send someone from their contacts or yourself or a chatbot, a crescent moon emoji. The correct emoji is the one of the moon without a face (). Once you have sent, a shower of crescent moon emojis will fill up your screen and you’ll get a prompt to activate the dark mode in settings. Go to your profile page in the app, wherein an option to switch the mode on will be present.

If there are no showers of crescent moons emojis on your screen, you might have to double-tap their message, restart Messenger, or update to the latest version of the Messenger app.

The dark mode looks as you would expect, replacing all the bright white backgrounds with black, and also inverts text from black to white to match. The search bar and some other rounded UI elements remain grey, but darker.

The introduction of dark mode comes a few months after, Facebook launched a redesigned version of the Messenger app called Messenger 4. The new simplified version now has three tabs instead of nine and your conversations, both one-to-one and groups, are now at centre in the Chats tab.

‘The dark mode will extend battery life for Android smartphones, as the reduced brightness leads to less battery drain,’ Google said at its 2018 Android Dev Summit.

The social media giant now has over 2.32 billion monthly active users (MAUs) globally, representing an increase of nine per cent (year-over-year), and 1.52 billion daily active users (DAUs), an increase of nine per cent.

The company will also launch ‘clear history’ tool that will allow users to wipe out their digital history from the Facebook.