When you spend a lot of time looking at screens — be it for work or leisure — the harshness of a white background can be quite a nuisance. Besides making your eyes hurt, it can also make focusing difficult, especially if you’re in a dark room.
Fortunately, every social media platform allows you to turn on dark mode whenever you need to rest your eyes. YouTube is among them, and this guide will teach you how to enable this handy feature on the platform.
Advantages of Dark Mode
As already mentioned, dark mode is easier on the eyes and causes less strain than regular white light mode. In addition, it might:
- Save battery life.
- Help reduce headaches.
- Enhance user experience (particularly on video platforms such as YouTube).
- Aid with sleep.
Enable Dark Mode on Desktop
If you use YouTube on your PC, you can turn on dark mode using the following instructions:
- Go to YouTube.com and log in to your account.
- Find your profile picture in the top right-hand corner of the screen and click on it.
- Select Appearance: Device theme from the menu.
- Choose the Dark theme option.
Enabling this feature will only apply to the YouTube tab in your browser, so any other tabs you may have open will still be in light mode. Moreover, the switch will remain even when you close YouTube and open it again in a new tab. If you want to change your settings again, you will have to follow the steps above once more.
Enable Dark Mode on iOS
For all iPhone and iPad users, switching to dark mode goes like this:
- Open the YouTube app and log in.
- Tap your avatar in the top right-hand corner.
- In the drop-down menu, select Settings.
- Choose General and then Appearance.
- Tap on the Dark theme option.
Enable Dark Mode on Android
And lastly, we’ll include the steps you need to take to turn on dark mode on your Android device.
- Open YouTube and log in to your account.
- Tap your profile picture located in the top right-hand corner.
- Scroll down until you find Settings and click on it.
- Tap General and then Appearance.
- Select Dark theme.
Quick tip: in case your phone theme is already set to dark mode, you can also opt for Use device theme in the last step. However, bear in mind that if you change your system theme to light, YouTube will automatically switch to it as well.