An input is the one surface a person types into and reads back character by
character, and a dark field on a dark ground gave it the least contrast on the
screen at the moment it mattered most. Typed text reads 18.3:1 on white; the
placeholder 4.6:1, because a placeholder is still text.
⚠️ **Its own colour, not `SurfaceAlt`.** That fill is shared with incoming
bubbles and the tab pill, which stay dark — a white message bubble on this
ground would read as somebody else's app.
🔴 **Every colour a field draws has to be named, not just the container.**
Material derives label, placeholder, cursor and outline from the colour scheme,
which is the DARK scheme here: setting only `containerColor` leaves a
light-on-dark placeholder on a white box, and it simply disappears. iOS had the
same failure in a different dialect — SwiftUI drew the placeholder and caret for
a dark background until the field was given `.environment(\.colorScheme, .light)`.
Two frameworks, one mistake: a white island in a dark app has to be told it is
an island.
One `fieldColors()` in `Theme.kt`, applied to all 34 `OutlinedTextField` call
sites. Mechanical and wide rather than a new wrapper composable, because a
wrapper would have to be adopted one screen at a time and the ones that were
missed would be exactly the ones nobody looks at.
⚠️ The message composer is a `BasicTextField` and stays dark. It is a pill in
the chat, not a form field, and turning it white would put a white bar across
the bottom of every conversation.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
