You are probably right that desktop vs. smartphone matters. And perhaps the amount of people and the amount they benefit doesn't weigh against the additional ba

You are probably right that desktop vs. smartphone matters. And perhaps the amount of people and the amount they benefit doesn't weigh against the additional battery usage. The best solution would be if you could simply switch between color schemes at will (and set a personal default). This page [1] suggests that most studies are even from before 'the web' (but from when is the page?). It has the quote by Jakob Nielsen that formed my opinion back when, from his well known 'Designing web usability': Use colors with high contrast between the text and the background. Optimal legibility requires black text on white background (so-called positive text). White text on a black background (negative text) is almost as good. Although the contrast ratio is the same as for positive text, the inverted color scheme throws people off a little and slows their reading slightly. Legibility suffers much more for color schemes that make the text any lighter than pure black, especially if the background is made any darker than pure white (Nielsen 2000, p 125) I don't own the book and can't check on his sources, but Nielsen generally bases such advise on research. Anyway, all I'm saying is that they may have simply thought to be improving their app, not necessarily to increase the shinyness. [1] http://web.mst.edu/~rhall/web_design/color_readability.html http://web.mst.edu/~rhall/web_design/color_readability.html