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This week’s top stories: Gmail dark theme, Pixelbook Go, Pixel 4 Themes app

Kyle Bradshaw | Sep 28 2019 - 6:00 am PT

In this week’s top stories: Gmail finally gets a dark theme on Android and iOS, we exclusively report on Google’s next Chromebook the “Pixelbook Go,” we get hands-on with many of the Google Pixel 4’s pre-installed apps, and so much more.

With the launch of dark mode toggles in both Android 10 and iOS 13, one app that people have begged Google to create a dark mode for is Gmail. As of this week, Gmail’s dark theme is rolling out to both Android and iOS devices and it looks gorgeous. According to the information provided to enterprise users, everyone should have dark theme available to them in Gmail within two weeks.

On Android 10, the darker look respects the system default “Dark Theme” setting, and will also be enabled when the Battery Saver is on. There is a manual menu in Settings > Theme. For iOS, it’s available as far back as iOS 11 via Settings > Dark Theme again. On iOS 13, Gmail will also follow the new dark mode.

In our first piece of exclusive Made by Google 2019 news for this week, our Stephen Hall was tipped a number of specs and details about Google’s next Chromebook, including the name — Pixelbook Go. The new information corroborated all of our earlier reporting and leaks from the past year about the Chromebook codenamed “Atlas,” including the option for a 4K display.

Similar to the Pixelbook and Pixel Slate that came before it, the Pixelbook Go will be available in a variety of tiers, across a wide spread of prices, separated by processing power, RAM, and in this case, display type. We’re told the Pixelbook Go will come in Intel Core m3, i5, and i7 configurations with either 8GB or 16GB of RAM and 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of storage.

In Pixel 4 news, our APK Insight team obtained — courtesy of NextRift — copies of many of the apps pre-installed on the Google Pixel 4 and proceeded to uncover all of the information that we could. Beyond exploring the new “Recorder” app, uncovering details about Motion Sense, and previewing a redesign to the Pixel Wallpapers app, the most interesting find was in the Pixel Themes app.

Our Dylan Roussel discovered that Pixel Themes could be installed and slightly altered (via adb) to create and use fully working custom themes for the Google Pixel 3. We’ve even made the app available for you to download and try out for yourself.

More Pixel 4 apps

In another bit of Pixel news, yet another Pixel 4 leaked out, this time to an English-speaking outlet, which allows us new insights into aspects of the phone that weren’t clear before. For example, we now know that the Google Pixel 4’s back glass will indeed still have a matte finish, but possibly not as great feeling of one as the Pixel 3 had.

The site also details ‘Face unlock’ and its various options in the Settings app. Apparently, you can customize many options of the feature. You can choose whether to use face unlock for unlocking your phone, app sign-in & payments, and just skipping the lock screen entirely. You can also require open eyes (or not) or always require a “confirmation step” when using face unlock in apps.