Dark Mode for Quicken for Windows (6 Merged Votes)

Supermann

wow. So many years later and we still don't have dark mode. No wonder I wait till the last minute to renew my subscription. Wish there was an alternative program out there to compete against Quicken. Seriously.

clarkcabin

B) Yes we NEED Dark Mode for Windows Quicken PLEASE!!!

Ps56k2

Wow … that’s the most important element to you concerning Quicken - is Dark Mode 😂

georgep03

Add me to the pack wanting dark mode in the Windows version.

retird

ME TOO..... DARK MODE

Michael Brown

Yes, dark mode...PLEASE! Been waiting on this for a long time.

Unknown

This content has been removed.

lroy

Yes for Dark Mode support.
Quicken asked me for my current version when i logged into the community.
I can't tell because the text on the "About Quicken" is not legible with my system in dark high contrast mode

Ronv777

I don't see a way to vote on this, so I'll put my 2¢ in this way! Please add a dark mode. I'm on the computer many hours a day, Quicken is much too bright, even when using charcoal color scheme.

Lupus63

I vote YES for DARK MODE. You make so many updates to the program, but never this.

Rocket J Squirrel

Quicken's very old graphics code does not have a switch they can flip to provide dark mode. They would have to manually rewrite a lot of graphics code. Vote all you want, but if they decide to do it, it will take significant time.

FlyerFran

I'd vote for some new colors.  Maybe that would be easier to do.

narrqchat

Of course we need this -- I am sure I'm not the only one with age-related or diabetic sensitivity which makes white screens very hard to work with.

I don't know what more to say, to get you at Quicken who are responsible for customers to prioritize this, and just get it done, thanks...!

negropy

Dark mode please!

muchy1

It's now Aug 30, 2022 and obviously nothing has been done about this.  I remember reading here a couple of years ago that the software used to create this Quicken program is so old it doesn't have a way of modifying certain aspects of it.  Maybe making a higher contrast option just can't be done.  I also remember reading the reason Quicken doesn't redo the program with more up to date software is that it would just be too big job.

jacobs

I don’t think it’s obvious that “nothing has been done” about implementing this new feature; all that’s obvious is that nothing has been completed. Big difference. I’m pretty sure that the development team has done work on this, but hasn’t completed their work. 

The Quicken Mac development team delivered this feature for the Mac product within the past year, after many months of work, but the code in Quicken Mac isn’t nearly as old as the code in parts of Quicken Windows. I’d guess that the Quicken Windows team has a bigger task in re-engineering the Windows app to support Dark Mode. I am not offering excuses, just suggesting an explanation about why it is taking so long to bring to fruition.

Snowman

@jacobs You are probably right. There is some very antiquated code in Quicken for Windows.

Chris_QPW

As a developer that works on programs that have really old code I would like to tell everyone that trying to put in a dark mode for Quicken will be a nightmare, time consuming endeavor.

Quicken Mac had the benefit of having more modern code/GUI to start with.

With the older Windows GUI libraries you might be talking about going to every single control and changing code for it to do the switch.  There isn't any "flip this switch" and all the GUI controls change.
Well, not "completely"  As in yes there are some settings that can affect he main fonts and colors, but it will not be "respected" everywhere.  What's more you have elements like the tax planner, lifetime planner, and the business form that are all "web pages" which would all be have to be tweaked separate from the main GUI controls.  Not to mention I'm sure there are controls that are from GUI libraries that are 20 years old.  This is one of the main reasons why Quicken Windows has a problem with all the different kinds of display scaling.

Quicken Windows to this day also has problems with multiple displays.  You have these features that have become the norm now, like multiple high resolution screens, and dark mode and such, and the newer libraries have added support for this, and as such it isn't too difficult to do in a modern program, but Quicken is far from a modern program.

Psychmstr

I would love Quicken's display preferences to offer a "dark mode." During the evening, when I usually work in low-light background, the current Quicken display just about blinds me. I am surprised that "dark mode" has not already been offered. Please consider adding dark mode as a display option.

Rocket J Squirrel

[Removed - Sarcasm]

Quicken Anja

Hello @Psychmstr,

Thank you for reaching out to the Community with your request.

Your idea has been merged into this already active Idea thread regarding the same request.

Thank you!

GeezerGeek

I'm sure that implementing dark mode in Quicken is a major change and is complicated by the age and the size of the Quicken application. However, there are several other Windows applications, older and larger than Quicken, that have already implemented dark mode. The Microsoft Office programs implemented dark mode quite some time ago and those applications are probably the oldest and largest Windows applications of all. All of the applications I use on Windows except for Quicken have already implemented dark mode. In light of that, I don't think any of these excuses are valid for Quicken not having implemented dark mode. It is long overdue.

Chris_QPW

GeezerGeek said:

I'm sure that implementing dark mode in Quicken is a major change and is complicated by the age and the size of the Quicken application. However, there are several other Windows applications, older and larger than Quicken, that have already implemented dark mode. The Microsoft Office programs implemented dark mode quite some time ago and those applications are probably the oldest and largest Windows applications of all. All of the applications I use on Windows except for Quicken have already implemented dark mode. In light of that, I don't think any of these excuses are valid for Quicken not having implemented dark mode. It is long overdue.

Microsoft Office isn't not older than Quicken. Microsoft has rewritten Microsoft Office many times over the years.  They are large enough to do this whereas the Quicken developers have never had that kind of resources.

TTSguy

Quicken has 2.5 million users worldwide @ $50 per subscription. Liars figure, but figures don't lie! That would be $125,000,000.  A number so big my iPhone couldn't show all the zero's. Could one get some developers that knew what they were doing to just create a new generation Quicken, and eliminate all the waste going to keep propping this one up, and trying to get it to do things that the program is too old to do? I think that is a fair question.

jacobs

@TTSguy First, I'm not sure of your numbers. Where do you get the 2.5 million paying subscribers number from? CEO Eric Dunn told Tech Crunch last September that the company had about 2 million active users; I doubt it has increased 25% in the past year.

When I Google "Quicken Inc. Annual Revenue", I see sites reporting under $100 million, and some under $50 million in revenue. Of course, since Quicken is a privately held company, so such value is a guesstimate. But when Quicken was sold by Intuit in 2016, publicly-held Intuit reported that Quicken contributed only $51 million in annual revenue. So if we assume Quicken has done reasonably well in retaining users over the ensuing 6 years, and if we factor in the average selling price of the software has increased, it seems the likely annual revenue is somewhere in the range of $60-$75 million rather than $125 million.

I suppose that your purpose in bringing up Quicken's revenue is to show there's more than ample money  for them to hire a boatload of additional programmers to make changes and improvements in Quicken which are both better and come out faster? But what good is knowing the revenue if we don't know anything about Quicken's operating costs? How many employees, and at what cost? (Programmers are only a small part of the company when you count call center support employees, senior management, finance and marketing staff, operations and office staff, etc.) How much is the cost of servers, of data providers such as Intuit for connectivity processing, Morningstar (or someone) for security prices services, of software services like this site run by Vanilla Forums, and so on? We don't know. Oh, and then there's the ownership group, Aquiline Capital Partners, which bought the company from H.I.G. Capital, which in turn bought it from Intuit; how much do they take off the top as their profit/return on their purchase of the company? These are all questions we could guess at, but we don't know.

Bottom line: we don't know the bottom line. Whether their annual revenues are $50 million or $75 million or even $125 million, that doesn't provide insight into whether they could hire more programmers to do more faster.

You suggest that they should hire "some developers that knew what they were doing to just create a new generation Quicken". Guess what? That's exactly what they've done over the past five years, with the creation of the Simplifi product. It's not identical to the decades-old Quicken desktop, but it isn't designed to be; it's designed to be entirely web-based so users can access it from any device anywhere, and so they can make code changes as often as they need to without the pain of pushing out new code users have to install. While Quicken executives know that some people, especially younger individuals, want such a zero-installation, use-anywhere product, they also know there is a camp of users who don't want their financial data in the cloud, so they continue to support and modernize the legacy desktop programs alongside building a separate modern product. 

Oh, but that's not what you meant; you wanted them to re-write desktop Quicken to do all the things it's been built to do over 30+ years, but with modern programming tools which aren't held back by old code and complexity, right? Well, have you followed the path of Quicken Mac, where they did exactly that? They started over completely from scratch with a modern database, modern tools, a UI powered by the modern operating system, etc.  And after more than a decade of work, the program still doesn't match all the feature in Quicken Windows, or its Mac predecessor. Now, some of those were lean years with only a handful of programmers in the waning days of Intuit owning the company, so that climb undoubtedly could have been shortened with more money and more programmers. But even over the past five years, since Quicken has been independent and the size of the Mac development team has been increased, they haven't been able to tackle hundreds of user requests for additional features.

I'm sure the executives have examined the difficulties of re-creating Quicken Mac as they plot how to modernize/upgrade/replace the old code in Quicken Windows. (Regarding the subject of this thread, dark mode came to macOS and Windows around the same time; Quicken Mac, which had much more modern code, still took more than a year to re-write and tweak the hundreds of screens and dialog boxes in the program to support dark mode.) But if you want them to just start over to create a new Quicken Windows using a modern database and programming tools, be careful what you wish for; the Quicken Mac re-write is a case study in the complexity of all the areas Quicken tackles, and the significant difficulty of re-creating myriad features users clamor for because it was in their old software.

I don't think there's an easy or fast path to modernize or replace Quicken Windows, pretty much irrespective of how much money there is to throw additional programmers at it. While I'm certain the executives at Quicken have a long-term path laid out, I'm equally certain they won't share their roadmap with you or me.

Chris_QPW

Actually I stated that incorrectly.  I should have said that Microsoft is a much bigger company and Microsoft Office is a much larger revenue stream, and Microsoft Office was extremely important to them, and as such they were willing to put much more resources into keeping Microsoft Office current than Intuit was for Quicken (a drop in the bucket for them) or Quicken Inc has been willing to put into it.

Was this all due to money alone?
Of course not.

Let me ask you something do you really believe that the “Desktop personal finance programs” are the future of personal finances?

I don’t.  And I don’t think Quicken Inc does either or Intuit before them, or Microsoft before that.  There is a reason big companies get out of business or sell them.

There is always going to be a cost vs benefit done on any big project like this, and the answer is going to keep coming up that it isn’t worth it.  Better to milk it until it dies and put the money towards what they believe might be a product they can keep selling in the future.

BTW there is a BIG difference between what it takes to keep a program current and to update one that has been neglected for years.

And @TTSguy I think you have used this phrase before “If it an’t broke, don’t fix it.”  Well, this what you get when live by that  philosophy.  I personally call that neglect.

Rocket J Squirrel

Chris_QPW said:

I think you have used this phrase before “If it an’t broke, don’t fix it.”  Well, this what you get when live by that

As Mrs. Squirrel will attest, my own motto is "If it ain't broke, tweak it until it breaks, then fix it." Same as Quicken's.

TTSguy

@Chris_QPW this leads me to another saying "If you don't have manpower, money or time to fix it right the first time first, how are you going to afford to fix it again the second time?' Seems that every time they try to fix one thing in a new version, they break something else, and this has been an ever lasting ongoing issue. No need to mention the obvious ones but you know what I'm saying. Oh yes, here's the Forbe's article that htere are 2.5 million users for @Jacobs: Quicken Bets Consumers Will Pay For Its New Personal Finance App Simplifi (forbes.com)

Chris_QPW

@TTSguy now that is a saying can believe in.  It and the article that you sited shows how the real world works.

People tend to think of software as "soft" just because soft is in the name.  It is anything but, when it is doing anything other than the most simple of task.  It is more akin to a building, with foundations built to support a given building.  You can sometimes build up on foundations that were never meant to support the given building.  You can "maintain" it with a work force that doesn't understand all the complex interconnects up to a point.  But sooner or later you are faced with something that no expert will touch unless you intend to tear it down and start over, and the non experts only patch things that are "good enough" until the next thing breaks, which might vary well be caused by they not understanding what they are fixing, let alone when the customer is asking for more features.  And one has to ask themselves if that is the right place to put your money.  Maybe if the location is all important the answer is yes, but if everyone has moved away from that location, maybe your money is better spent at a different location.

2.5 million users might sound like a lot, but bear in mind who is funding Quicken Inc these days (people that want see their money grow), and the fact that there is a high cost overhead to boot.
That number may be "stable" or "going down" we don't know, but if it isn't "growing" the people funding Quicken Inc might still pull the plug.

jacobs

@TTSguy Thanks for the citation of the Forbes article. Not that it really matters in terms of the Big Picture you and Chris have been discussing, but it's interesting to note a few things about the few hard numbers we have…

In the Forbes article from January 2020, it states that "subscriber growth [was] more than 40% last year", which sounds great on the surface, but lacks very important context. The "last year" in that sentence was 2019. Well, Quicken only switched to subscriptions in fall 2017, and previously, most users of Quicken purchased a new version once every three years to retain connected services. So in the first full year of subscriptions, 2018, there were many people who didn't sign on for a subscription while their existing Quicken 2017 or 2016 still worked perfectly well. So it's not surprising that the number of subscribers in 2019 was therefore much higher than in 2018, as more users needed to subscribe to retain the online services. Forbes misleadingly presents the 40% subscriber growth if the company was on a huge upward trajectory, while the stat actually only reflects the progression of users being forced onto a subscription pricing plan.

Also in the Forbes article, it says there were at that time (January 2020) 2.5 million active users. But "active users" is not the same as "paying users". As of January 2020, there were likely a lot of people who were still using Quicken 2017 (and earlier versions) who were not subscribers. So that's why you can't multiply "active users" by average cost to get revenue; the number you'd need to know is "subscribers" or "paying users".

It's also puzzling that the customer base numbers in these two articles don't seem to add up. The Tech Crunch article I mentioned was from September 2021 — 20 months later than the Forbes article — and stated that Quicken had 2 million active users at that time. And it has Quicken CEO Eric Dunn saying that the 2 million users were " 'significantly higher' than what it had at the time of its spinoff from Intuit. So when Quicken was spun out of Intuit in April 2016 it had "significantly" fewer than 2 million active users; then in January 2020 it had 2.5 million active users; and then in September 2021 it had 2 million active users?

Big picture-wise, the other interesting number in the Forbes article is that over 30 years, Quicken has had more than 17 million users, and now has somewhere around 2 to 2.5 million. The 17 million wasn't all at one time, of course, but it seems to reflect that the customer base has declined significantly. So it's not surprising that the company put time and money into creating Simplifi to try to insure its future. While Quicken has around 2 million (more or less) users, Intuit's Mint has 20 million — and that's the user base Quicken clearly sought to chase with Simplifi. Mint is free but ad-supported, and Quicken felt that some people would pay to have an ad-free product. If Quicken can get just 5% of Mint customers to switch to Simplifi, Quicken will increase its customer base by 50%.

Apologies for going WAY off-topic from the discussion of dark mode in Quicken Windows.