Something else about light themes I don't think I've seen in so many words:

I strongly suspect most apps these days are made for dark theme, in dark theme, by people who only like dark theme. The light theme sometimes doesn't work great, or it feels grudgingly implemented, half-assed.

The dark themes you see probably are optimized by people who care about them but don't think that means the light ones are. They aren't necessarily ideal for people who need light themes; this is just all we get.

Oh by the way I confirmed this is true for Discord specifically. https://blog.discord.com/light-theme-redeemed-c541b7ab13e9

"Even within our office, it was hard to find more than one or two actual light theme users. Our small team of designers didn’t design with it in mind when creating new features. It became an afterthought. Testing on light theme was rare, and considered a chore."

"It eventually became a Discord community inside joke that light theme was bad and you were bad for using it."

Interestingly, that post is a couple years old and it was written to announce the new golden age of light theme; I started using Discord after that and I still hate it, haha.

But it's amazing to see how much worse it was! The sidebar was still dark! Because no one could need to read those words too! The contrast is terrible! If you love dark so much why is the text medium-grey?! The fonts are so thin! Fonts are the thing that shouldn't be light even in light mode! ( https://www.wired.com/2016/10/how-the-web-became-unreadable/)

The podcast app I use had been kinda annoying and glitchy so when a friend mentioned the one he used seemed good I thought I'd try it.

It doesn't have most of the problems I had before. But it does have the problem that whether I choose "light mode" or "light high contrast" or select the option for using my Android settings (which are for light everywhere), the now-playing page and the (all-important, to me) sleep timer page still look like this.

How is that light mode??

I'm so tired.