How to Enable Dark Mode in WhatsApp for Android (Root Required)

Let’s be honest, almost everybody loves dark themes, and it all happens for good reason: they’re so much easier on the eyes, especially in the night when everything with a light visual style is painful, to say the least.

In the last 12 months or so, the majority of developers noticed this trend of switching to dark mode, so they tried to adapt with similar updates for their apps.

This is why dark modes are so common these days, and they’re not available only in apps, but also in operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows 10, and macOS.

Developers that haven’t already updated their apps to feature a dark theme are most likely working on such an update already, and WhatsApp is currently part of this group.

We’ve known for a while that WhatsApp is preparing a dark mode for its instant messaging app, and this is big deal for several reasons.

First and foremost, a dark mode would allow WhatsApp to align with the rest of the operating system. As I said, both Android and iOS now come with a system-wide dark mode, so such a visual facelift would obviously enhance consistency on a mobile device.

And second of all, WhatsApp is currently the number one mobile messaging app, with more than 1 billion users worldwide. Being so popular also creates responsibilities, and with dark modes becoming so popular, it’s pretty clear that WhatsApp just needs this visual update.

WhatsApp started the work on the dark mode earlier this year, and beta builds showed that the company was in a more or less advanced development stage for this feature. However, it’s still yet to be released to public users.

Fortunately, if you have a rooted Android phone, you can enable it right now with just a small hack. Keep in mind that the magic word here is “rooted,” as you can’t do this on an Android phone that hasn’t been unlocked.

As a summary of what you’re going to need, check out the requirements below:

• WhatsApp for Android latest version (any stable release will do, but I recommend you to install at least version 2.19.352)
• Rooted Android phone
• Text editor for Android (I recommend QuickEdit)

If you have all of the above, you’re ready to start.

First of all, launch the text editor and open the following file on your Android device: /data/data/com.whatsapp/shared_prefs and open com.whatsapp_preferences.xml

Scan the file and look for the following snippet at the end of the code:

Just above it, paste the following code:

Save the changes and then close the file. At this point, what you need to do is stop WhatsApp, but you can very well reboot your device as well if you find this more convenient. Once you do this, WhatsApp should be ready to enable the dark theme. Open the app and browse to

WhatsApp Settings Theme Dark.

The new visual style is applied immediately and an app restart is not needed. However, there still are a few things that you need to know:

• On some devices, the light mode is re-enabled after closing the app
• There are no…