How to Make Your Gboard Automatically Match Your Android’s Dark or Light Theme
Setting up dark mode on your Android is easy, but making sure the Gboard keyboard suits your preference for light or dark sides takes a little more manual work. And if you want your keyboard color to change when your Android theme changes – for example, at certain times of the day – the process gets a little confusing.
Solution? Beta, of course. But before we get to that, let’s talk about why you would want to install it on your Android at all (unless you’re using Samsung and you really prefer this keyboard over Google, I suppose).
As Android Police explains:
“Until now, Gboard has only followed the system theme if you’ve never customized the look of your keyboard. Even something as simple as adding borders around the keys will prevent the application from switching when night falls. “
Not good. I’m surprised it took Google so long to find a way to combine your Android system theme with the GBoard theme, but here we are. To get your hands on this new feature, you first need to register for the Gboard keyboard beta, which you can do by pulling out our Android, navigating to the app listing in the Google Play Store and looking for the big (but easily missed) Join Beta link -testing “:
Once you’re signed in, wait a few minutes and then update the GBoard app. You must use at least version “9.6.4.320679808”; you can check your version in the list of apps in the Google Play Store. If you don’t want to compare all of these numbers, just search for the word “beta”. somewhere in the version number. If you see this, you are up to date enough to (hopefully) get the new features of the theme.
I say this with skepticism because this is, again, a feature deployment, which means you might not see the new theme options even if you opted for beta. But if you have one, you’ll want to open the GBoard settings, looking for the gear icon whenever you use your keyboard to type a message:
From there click on “Subject”. If you’re lucky, you’ll see three new themes: System Auto, Default Light, and Default Dark.
System Auto is what you want to choose if you have set your phone to switch system themes based on the time of day. Once this is selected, your GBoard keyboard will follow suit – whatever theme you set in Android, your keyboard will look like this too.