How to detect dark mode in iOS

Swift version: 5.0

Paul Hudson    @twostraws    June 4th 2019

If you need to take specific action depending on whether your user is running in light mode or dark mode – for example, doing some different drawing – then you should query the userInterfaceStyle of your view controller’s trait collection.

For example, this will print one of two messages when the user taps the screen depending on whether the device is set to light mode or dark mode:

override func touchesBegan(_ touches: Set<UITouch>, with event: UIEvent?) {
    if traitCollection.userInterfaceStyle == .light {
        print("Light mode")
    } else {
        print("Dark mode")
    }
}

Available from iOS 13.0

Did this solution work for you? Please pass it on!

Tweet

Other people are reading…

• How to scale, stretch, move, and rotate UIViews using CGAffineTransform
• How to adjust image content mode using aspect fill, aspect fit and scaling
• What is a UIViewController
• How to adjust a UIScrollView to fit the keyboard
• What’s the difference between frame and bounds?

About the Swift Knowledge Base

This is part of the Swift Knowledge Base, a free, searchable collection of solutions for common iOS questions.