Color palettes for mobile apps

Smaller screens. Varying ambient light. System chrome eating your viewport — status bars, navigation bars, home indicators. Colors that look balanced on a 27-inch monitor fall apart on a 6-inch screen.

Subtle color differences disappear. Low-contrast text becomes unreadable in sunlight. Your carefully chosen muted palette turns to mud on OLED. Mobile demands higher contrast, cleaner separation, and deliberate restraint.

Dark mode is not optional on mobile. Over 80% of users enable it. If your app doesn't support it, you look broken. If you support it poorly — inverted colors, crushed contrast, eye-searing accent on black — you look amateur.

Your palette needs two variants. Light and dark. Same roles, adjusted values. Background goes dark, ink goes light, accent stays recognizable but shifts luminance. Paletter generates both variants with consistent role mapping.