Those of you who have been waiting for Facebook Messenger to get a dark mode, well, the wait is over. You can now enable the dark mode in Facebook’s Messenger application, though the process of doing so is rather unusual.
In order to enable dark mode, you need to open a conversation with whomever, navigate to emojis, and find a moon emoji, a regular one, as pictured down below. Once you do that, send that moon emoji in a message, only that emoji, nothing else. Once you do that, a ton of moon icons will start dropping from the top of the display, and you will get a message that a dark mode can be enabled. You can either tap that message to enable it, or simply navigate to settings, and the first option you’ll see will be “Dark Mode”.
In order to access Facebook Messenger settings in this new design is by navigating to the main page in Messenger, and then tapping on your profile icon in the top-left corner. Enabling dark mode should be a breeze for all of you, but make sure to update Messenger before you do, we were not on the last version of the app, and this trick did not work for us at first, until we updated. Also, keep in mind that this feature is still in beta, which is something Facebook tells you once you enable it. It seems to be working fine, but it is worth noting it is still in development.
This is not the first time Facebook included a feature that is activated by sending an emoji, the company did that a couple of times thus far. Some of you probably remember that basketball game that you could access by sending a basketball emoji, and then tapping on it. That’s just one example, of course.
Facebook had promised dark mode in Messenger quite some time ago, back when the company announced that a huge redesign to the app is coming. That redesign arrived at the end of last year, but the dark mode was not included from the get-go, it took the company a bit of extra time to prepare it.
It is unclear whether this will remain the activation procedure for Messenger’s dark mode once the feature exits the beta stage, but there you go. It would be much simpler to have this option in settings at all times, which will probably be the case when the time comes.
Facebook’s Messenger application is one of the most popular messaging platforms on Android, and also iOS. The application has been downloaded well over 1 billion times thus far, and it is one of the very few non-Google applications that managed to cross that number. The app has been rated over 64 million times, and it’s currently holding a 4.1-star rating in the Play Store, as it had its issues, and still has some bugs.
Facebook Messenger’s new design is considerably different to the previous design, though it’s quite functional, and much cleaner than the old design used to be, mainly because there are not a ton of menus available on the front page. This design doesn’t exactly follow Google’s material design guidelines, it’s considerably different than what you’re used to.
