Well, it looks like the rumors of a dark mode in iOS 10 have come and gone. Yet oddly enough, there are still signs in iOS that indicate Apple occasionally likes crossing over to the dark side. A clever trick allows you to bring some of that out in the form of a black dock, black home screen folders and dark widgets.
It doesn’t take much to enable what is clearly a slight glitch. All you need is a willingness to change your wallpaper to something specific. And iOS 10.
The Trick to Get Black Dock and Folders
The black UI elements appear due to a glitch when changing your wallpaper to something very specific. Thanks to Wonder How To for piecing together this oddly delightful hack.
To begin, first head to this Weebly site from your iPhone. It has an assortment different wallpapers that are only one pixel in height. For whatever reason, it’s precisely this that causes parts of the iOS UI to turn black. Press and hold the square for the wallpaper color you want, then tap Save Image to download it to your Camera Roll. (If you don’t want just a solid color for your wallpaper, keep scrolling down further on the page for some multicolor options.)
Now that you have your image, the only job left is to set it as your wallpaper.
Open the Photos app and find the wallpaper you saved. It should appear as a very thin strip. Tap the Share icon at the bottom left and choose Use as Wallpaper. Then choose Set Home Screen. (You can also choose Set Both if you want the wallpaper on your lock screen as well, but it needs to at least be on the home screen.)
Go Home and look at this sorcery. Notice that several UI elements are now black or very dark. You have a black dock, the home screen folders are black, your widgets now have dark backgrounds and even the X icons to delete apps are a darker gray. Unfortunately, home screen folders are still translucent white when you tap to expand them, but still black otherwise.
The one downside is that widgets are pretty hard to read since the text remains black too, but other than that this is a pretty cool way to change up the look and feel of iOS. It seems like Apple at the very least entered a testing phase with dark mode, but nothing ever came to fruition… yet.
