Opening Notepad and jotting down some quick notes – aah! That’s the vibe of the 90’s. I’m sure many of our readers still do the same (albeit covertly), while they prefer to use ‘modern’ & ‘connected’ note taking services such as Evernote, Google Keep or Microsoft OneNote.

microsoft_clippy
Talking about 90’s, Clippy was our own digital assistant back then

With the advent of smartphones and easy-to-access high speed internet connectivity, the makers of the note taking apps eventually added support for cloud based note syncing across multiple devices, touch screen as well as inking compatibility and the ability to be used on multiple platforms.

OneNote from Microsoft, a popular note taking app, started its journey as a part of Microsoft Office suite. The Redmond company quickly made it an independent product, which is now available on Windows, iOS, Android and a dedicated web interface. And yes, a dark mode is ‘secretly’ present as well!

onenote_windows_dark_mode
Click/Tap to zoom

The blackish theme was first discovered by the Italian blog Aggiornamenti Lumia. According to them, the feature should be rolled out soon on every platform, including Android. Laura Butler, Microsoft’s VP of Notes and Tasks, even acknowledged the existence of the feature.

onenote_dark_mode_laura_tweet

Well, it looks like someone has pushed the big red button at Microsoft headquarter, as the long anticipated dark mode is finally available on Android. The interface is not true black though (more of a greyish), but the inverted color does its job.

onenote_android_dark_mode

The above image came from this blog, and the author did not do anything fancy to get the dark treatment. While we are on the latest public version of OneNote for Android (16.0.11727.20002 at the time of writing this article), the theme is not available on our devices. Must be server side toggle – don’t you think?

I just noticed my OneNote for Android has dark mode enabled. I’d read from reports in April that this was coming, and that it would mirror the theme settings on the PC connected to the same account, but my PC OneNote is currently set to the Light theme.

The dark theme isn’t perfect though. It looks like it needs some work with the font colors. I’m on Android 7.1.1.

It is unclear that the dark theme is available via Insider channel or regular release path as well. Nonetheless, the propagation is being done in a staged manner, so you need to wait a little to get the all black OneNote app on your Android device.

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Kingshuk De
896 Posts

I came from a mixed background of Statistics and Computer Science. My research domains included embedded computer systems, mobile computing and delay tolerant networks in post-disaster scenarios. Apart from tinkering with gadgets or building hackintosh, I like to hop on various subreddits and forums like MyDigitalLife and XDA.

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