Blank black screen goes light to dark bottom up (hard to explain in title)

[tomatosouplabs]

I don't know why but this bothers me without knowing why it's doing it. The best examples to illustrate is below. One is dark theme in K-9 Mail. The other is a "blank screen" starting up WeatherBug before it draws everything. I also remembered the old Moto X dialer before Kit Kat update had this effect. Is this some sort of standard dark theme built into Android for blank screens? I don't understand why it isn't just completely black. I don't remember K-9 doing this on my old phone with android 2.3.

 

[tomatosouplabs]

I just realized the settings does this too. So is this a default android dark theme that some apps use for the background, with what I guess is referred to as a gradient? I wonder if we can turn off this gradient, so we get better contrast. It's AMOLED screen so why not take advantage of the awesome blacks we have? Is the purpose to highlight the boundary between the soft navigation buttons and the app display area?

 

[anon(847090)]

I just realized the settings does this too. So is this a default android dark theme that some apps use for the background, with what I guess is referred to as a gradient? I wonder if we can turn off this gradient, so we get better contrast. It's AMOLED screen so why not take advantage of the awesome blacks we have? Is the purpose to highlight the boundary between the soft navigation buttons and the app display area?

Yes

 

[someguy01234]

Not sure if you are new to stock Android, but every since Android 3.0 Honeycomb, the default style of Android's settings page background have been a gradient similar to that. It's not a default dark theme, it is THE default theme.

The reason why you wonder it's not all black is understandable since you're using an AMOLED display which takes advantage of the black.

 

[karmamule]

I just realized the settings does this too. So is this a default android dark theme that some apps use for the background, with what I guess is referred to as a gradient? I wonder if we can turn off this gradient, so we get better contrast. It's AMOLED screen so why not take advantage of the awesome blacks we have? Is the purpose to highlight the boundary between the soft navigation buttons and the app display area?

My guess is this is primarly an aesthetic rather than functional choice. Gradients have become so common they're almost taken for granted by most people, but with flat UIs becoming more in vogue these days I wouldn't be surprised to see this change.

At least to my eyes the effect is much more pronounced when you have your display brightness cranked, so if you haven't already set it on the low side you might want to try that to minimize it as much as you can. My display is around 20% brightness and the gradient is much less obvious than it is at the higher settings.