Google Translate's dark mode rollout has been an interesting saga to follow. It first showed up in February but looked like a massive eyesore or a very early prototype, then it disappeared for months, despite being available for everyone on iOS. It popped back up again last week, looking better and fresher, but only bestowed its magic on a few users. A few days after that, it began showing up for more people and now seems to have widely rolled out to (almost?) everyone.

This final iteration of the dark theme looks decent compared to what we saw in February. It's a lot more homogenous with dark greys everywhere and the same shade of blue as accent color.

Almost all of the interface has been turned over to the dark side, from the various input methods (handwriting, camera, conversation) to the phrasebook, settings, and various selection and overflow menus.

The only holdout is the new real-time transcription mode which shows up in white despite being set to follow the default system theme. You can manually switch it to dark though, so hopefully that's a small bug that'll be fixed soon.

Even though there's a theme picker in this live transcription screen, it only affects that part of the interface, which is curious. Unfortunately, there's no manual setting to pick the main theme of the whole app, so you can't force a specific one. It'll just follow the system default on your Android 9, 10, or 11 device.

To get the new dark theme, you need to be on v6.10 of Google Translate (APK Mirror), but there's also a server-side switch that controls it. Odds are everyone has it enabled now, but if you don't, be patient. It'll hopefully show up for you soon.

Thanks: Nick Cipriani, Edds, Esra Christian