night-light_thumb.pngAndroid-using e-reading fans who have opted for the Night Reading mode that Chris Meadows wrote up in detail last year could be in for a disappointment. According to a report in Android Police, quoting Google Developer Programs Engineer Dan Sandler, Google’s Dark Theme and Night Mode are both going to be missing from the production release of Android N. The reason is that both apparently make too much of a performance hit on the new iteration of the world’s favorite mobile OS, and are generally just not up to the same standard as the rest of the OS. Another report in Android Police notes that Night Mode is still available in Android N Developer Preview 3, but will all the same be likely to disappear in the production release.

Chris is busy experimenting with Android N, so it should be interesting to see if he confirms this report and his experience with the build. Whether any users will miss Night Mode is another matter. Despite its fine-tuning features for the system UI, I’m still not convinced that it adds much to the user experience for e-reading. Amazon’s Blue Shade certainly doesn’t. Over to you anyway, Chris.

1 COMMENT

  1. At the moment, the “Night Light” feature is still available in Play Books on my Nexus 6 in Android N. But I can’t see as removing it makes much difference, as I never use it anyway. Twilight still works just fine, and it covers all applications.

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