My widespread family uses Facebook Messenger to keep in touch. I prefer to use Messenger Lite instead of the full Messenger app because the "reactions" in the full app drive me crazy. I'm always posting emoji replies to messages by mistake and sometimes they're not appropriate. But Messenger Lite doesn't have a dark mode, unless you use Facebook Lite, and I'm using the full Facebook app.
Even though Android 11 has a system-wide dark mode setting, Messenger Lite doesn't respect it (along with several other apps - more about that later).
After my latest round of frustration with Messenger, I did some more googling and found that Android has a setting to force dark mode. However, you have to enable Developer options first.
On my Pixel 4a, the setting to force dark mode is in Developer Options uner Hardware Accelerated Rendering as "Override force-dark".
Turning that on will give you dark mode in Messenger Lite. There is one issue that I found after turning my phone off for the night. It's not a persistent setting. You have to enable it each time you restart your phone. It's a bit of a pain but I guess I can live with it. I could probably automate it with something like If This Then That, but it's too much trouble right now.
Of course, it also affects other apps. I found a problem with my SwiftKey keyboard. I use a high-contrast keyboard, and forcing dark mode made some of the keys (like shift and backspace) invisible. I had to go into the SwiftKey settings and find another theme (Magnetite isn't ideal but works).
Some apps, like the New York Times app, still don't respect dark mode even with the override. However, opening the Times site in Firefox works OK. Chrome still insists on ignoring dark mode, which I find odd, although its Simplified View setting works on some sites.
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