Splync 1.13: Improved Visibility in Dark Mode

As you may know, you can change your iPhone’s appearance between Light mode and Dark mode. If you’re not sure how to switch it, follow these steps: Open your iPhone Settings, scroll down, and tap Display & Brightness. You’ll see two preview images labeled Light and Dark. Tap the one you prefer to apply it. This lets you customize your screen for better visibility and comfort depending on your environment. Light Mode has existed since the very first iPhone. Apple officially introduced Dark Mode to iPhone and iPad with iOS 13 / iPadOS 13 in September 2019. This feature pleased many iPhone users with customized UI appearance. Some people prefer Light Mode, while others are passionately devoted to Dark Mode. You can also choose Automatic, which switches between the two modes based on the time of day.

An app might look perfect in Light Mode but appear completely different in Dark Mode. In some cases, Dark Mode can unintentionally disrupt the developer’s original design intentions, affecting colors, contrast, and overall aesthetics. This means developers must carefully design and test their interfaces in both modes to ensure a consistent and enjoyable experience for all users. One possible solution is to prepare separate views and image assets for Light Mode and Dark Mode. However, this approach quickly becomes redundant and difficult to maintain, especially as the app grows and new UI components are added. For this reason, most developers avoid this method and instead rely on more scalable solutions that adapt automatically to both appearance modes.

Luckily, Apple introduced system-defined colors that automatically adapt to both Light Mode and Dark Mode. By using these built-in colors, developers can ensure their UI elements adjust seamlessly based on the user’s appearance settings. This removes the need to manually manage separate designs and helps maintain visual consistency across both modes. For example, colors such as label, systemBackground, and secondarySystemBackground dynamically change depending on the current appearance, allowing apps to remain readable and visually balanced in any environment. That’s why, when you switch from Light Mode to Dark Mode, the default text color changes from black to white. However, if an app hard-codes its text color to black, the text will remain black even in Dark Mode, making it almost invisible against a dark background. To prevent this issue, developers rely on system colors, ensuring that text and UI elements automatically adapt to the appropriate color for each mode.

Splync was not very friendly to Dark Mode users at first. When one user reported that the category icons were hard to see in Dark Mode, I couldn’t address it right away. At the time, I was focused on improving the app’s core features, so I didn’t prioritize this visual issue. Then the new year 2026 arrived, and I finally took a closer look. What I discovered was simple but important: The icon images themselves were pure black. In technical terms, they were fixed to the color #000000. This means they stayed black no matter what mode the phone was using. So in Dark Mode, black icons were sitting on a dark background like camouflage. On top of that, I had also used a fixed white color in my code to soften the icon backgrounds. This worked fine in Light Mode, but in Dark Mode it created awkward contrast and didn’t feel natural.

So here’s what I changed. Instead of forcing colors, my revised code tells the app to let the system decide the icon color automatically; Black in Light Mode and White in Dark Mode. Additionally, the code is telling the app to use each category’s own color as a soft background tint, add a subtle border using the same category color, and keep everything clean and readable in both modes. In simple terms, I stopped forcing colors and let iPhone handle them intelligently. Thanks to this improvement, category icons now adapt naturally to Light and Dark Mode, making them clearly visible and visually consistent in any environment. This fix didn’t take much time, but I decided to release an update immediately so that long-awaited issues for Dark Mode users could finally be resolved as quickly as possible.

There is no single “perfect” aesthetic. Everyone has a different sense of design. Even the same person may feel differently depending on the day — or even the time of day. What looks great in the morning might feel distracting at night. That’s why developers must focus on customization, while still balancing it with simple and intuitive usability. Good design isn’t about forcing one style. It’s about letting users choose what feels right for them — That's what I believe.