Button text is unreadable with Dark theme

[denyshon]

Steps to reproduce

Just open the app. You can see buttons during the onboarding, in the Polls room section etc.

Outcome

What did you expect?

The text is readable, dark for the light buttons and light for the dark buttons.

What happened instead?

The text is always light, and therefore almost unreadable on the buttons with a light background (which as the majority).

Your phone model

Redmi Note 7 Pro

Operating system version

Android 10

Application version and app store

Element X version 25.11.0

Homeserver

mozilla.modular.im

Will you send logs?

No

Are you willing to provide a PR?

No

[denyshon]

Here are some screenshots:

[denyshon]

It also applies to notifications

[jmartinesp]

That's odd, we have screenshot tests to ensure this doesn't happen, and I just checked what it looks like on emulators and test devices and saw this:

I see you're using a Xiaomi device, I seem to recall some of those have a feature to force the dark mode, maybe that's causing the issue, as in, the app believes it's in light mode but the OS is forcing it to try using the dark theme. Could you check if that's in use in your case?

[denyshon]

@jmartinesp how can I check that? What I'm using is system Dark mode, which I can access via Settings -> Display -> Color scheme (Light mode / Dark mode). The OS, however, is not pure Android; it's Xiaomi's MIUI (in my case, MIUI Global 12.5.1).

[jmartinesp]

Can I ask you to try the app generated in this PR? Since we can't reproduce the issue as we don't have a MIUI device, we'd need you to test this to check if the tentative fix works. It will install as a different app, 'Element X dbg', and if all goes well it should display the expected colors instead of the mix of light and dark ones you see now.

[denyshon]

@jmartinesp I'm more than happy to help with testing. This PR helps, but there's a weird thing: when I first open the app (after a shutdown), it displays the white text, but as soon as I leave it and then return to it, the text becomes black (and looks as intended).

[denyshon]

Screenrecorder-2025-11-10-13-47-04-251.mp4

[jmartinesp]

I'm not sure what could be causing that, to be honest. I've tried adding another check to disable this behaviour, could you try downloading the APK again and running the same test? Thanks!

[denyshon]

@jmartinesp still the same behavior. I have to clarify that it happens with every new page displayed: once it's displayed, the text is white, and I have to switch-return to make it normal.

Screenrecorder-2025-11-10-14-48-38-55.mp4

[denyshon]

As you can see from the recording, when I tap the button, the text becomes white while the button is pressed. What's more, if I tap and hold the button (without pressing), it may become normal for the one next switch-return, and after that, the whole app will be stuck broken until shutdown.

[denyshon]

If there's a way to debug locally, I'll be happy to try

[jmartinesp]

I'm sorry, but I don't think there's a way to debug it locally, sadly. I believe it's an issue on how your version of MIUI implements dark mode, because I tried reproducing it on an emulator using Android 10 and it didn't work.

The last option I can think about is: if you have the developer options in the OS settings enabled, check you don't have an option called 'dark mode' or 'force dark mode' enabled in that list of settings. In this article there's a few screenshots of what that could look like: https://www.nextpit.com/how-tos/force-apps-use-dark-mode-android.

[denyshon]

@jmartinesp Thank you very much! I've been able to determine the cause. It was a regular setting (not requiring the developer mode), Adjust text and background automatically, which was (for an unknown reason) on by default. Not sure if you can fully counter it, but after disabling it, the release app works perfectly.