Google’s Weather app isn’t an app in the strictest sense — it’s more like a direct link to search the term “weather” in the Google app — but it does give you plenty of forecast data in a tabbed interface with a friendly frog as your weatherperson. It very seldomly receives updates, so it’s had essentially the same UI for years aside from adding tablet support — and until now, that has included a blinding white background with no respect for your phone’s dark mode setting.
Many users are spotting a new dark theme in Google’s Weather app this week. It seems to have appeared automatically, swapping out the white background for dark gray in many areas. The top of the app is still dark blue, and the main forecast view on the Today and Tomorrow tabs still features a cartoonish background that mirrors the day’s weather. But aside from those places, every other element is now dark.
Forecast details, precipitation, wind speed, sunrise and sunset times, the 10-day forecast view, the account switcher, and even the search menu have received the dark mode treatment. The new feature respects your phone’s dark theme setting, so it even changes automatically from gray back to white if you’ve configured dark mode to turn on and off at certain times.
Sadly, this might not be a permanent change. 9to5Google speculates the Weather app's dark mode comes as a result of a bug in a recent Android System Webview update, version 110.0.5481.65. Users who are seeing this dark theme have that version of Android's in-app browser installed alongside beta version 14.8.8 of the Google app. And it's not a universal experience, as this dark theme is only showing up on Pixel phones, so it's very possible that the next update to either Webview or Google forces us all back to the light theme.
Here's hoping the dark theme sticks around — if not, maybe Google sees this news and finally gets motivated to make its weather app fully compatible with dark mode.