Oliver Haslam on March 15, 2018, 2:28 am

How To Enable YouTube Dark Theme Mode On Android Right Now

We told you yesterday how Google had made a new “Dark Theme” mode available for those YouTube users who are watching their videos on an iOS device, and that was great news.

Unfortunately, those with Google’s own devices, Android phones, were out of luck with the company simply saying that support for a dark theme mode in the YouTube for Android app was in the works. No timescales for a release were given, and that sucked.

However, that is thankfully not the end of the story with crafty developers coming up with a way to get a nice, dark YouTube experience immediately.

The bad news? There always has to be some and in the case it’s the fact that your device will need to be rooted in order for you to get your dark theme on right now, but if you are, here’s what you need to do.

Download and then install Preferences Manager. The app is free, and available for download from the Google Play Store.
Find YouTube in the list when you launch your newly installed Preferences Manager.
Open youtube.xml file.
In it, search for the word “dark” without the quotes. Once found, change both values from false to true. You may need to add them if they are not already present, so create theme_dark_app and theme_dark_watch_panel and set them both to true.
Save and then force close YouTube before re-opening it.

That’s all you need to do. Your YouTube app should now be all black, something that non-rooted YouTube watchers will have to wait for. Hopefully it won’t be too long before Android users get their dark theme officially, just like those with iPhones and iPads.