The other useful vision accessibility setting is "Color Filters" - I've used this one two different ways.<p>Currently, I've got it set to put a reddish-orange cast on the screen - like a "turbo night shift" more similar to the depth F.lux will let you take your mac. You can use the Shortcuts app to create a shortcut to enable the filter, and then set that to turn on at certain points, so around 10 at night my phone goes from normal night shift to a much more aggressive red/orange-shifted profile. The effect at night is dramatic - the phone becomes much less jarring to look at. The OLED screens are great for this, too - a reduction in blue color is a reduction in blue light. The shortcut turns itself back off at 6am.<p>The other filter you can apply is a black & white filter, which removes all color from the screen. Give this a try for an hour and then turn it off - you'll be amazed at the riot of attention-grabbing color app makers are throwing at you. I've found it's a lot easier not to get sucked into the phone hole when the UI is set to black & white - the whole device feels calmer and less urgent.<p>If you haven't spent time in the accessibility settings, though, go exploring. It's where Apple puts all the good stuff.
I've been using a similar shortcut like this for a while on iOS for bedtime reading. I hadn't seen the "reduce whitepoint" option before, but by setting the shortcut to "zoom" you can get a similar (possibly slightly dimmer?) effect. The trick is to make it so the zoom shortcut dims the unzoomed area, and then set the unzoomed area to the entire screen. I just checked, and the effects of those two settings stack to make things quite dark.
Even better for bed time (and even stargazing) is the add a red mode. I have had my power button triple click toggle this for many years.<p>It can be hard to operate if you turn the blue leds off entirely but you don’t need much.<p><a href="https://www.blockbluelight.com/blogs/news/how-to-turn-your-iphone-screen-red#:~:text=Select%20Settings%20%3E%20General%20%3E%20Accessibility%20%3E,and%20your%20custom%20red%20screen" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.blockbluelight.com/blogs/news/how-to-turn-your-i...</a>.
I would love an Android app that lets me reliably set the brightness to 1 or 2%. Not 3%, not 0%. The default slider makes this nearly impossible. I've tried a few programs to do this and none worked well.
On Pixel phones you can assign the extra dim toggle to pressing both volume keys at once. It's also accessible on many Android phones via a quick settings tile.
Ha, I've been working on some similar projects in the past couple of weeks! (Although I was aiming for a much, much darker screen.)<p>Here are my design/dev notes:<p><a href="https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires</a><p><a href="https://untested.sonnet.io/Night+Rider" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://untested.sonnet.io/Night+Rider</a><p>The idea to work on this was partially inspired by stargazing apps, e.g. NightSky.<p>I'm still not 100% if these experiments are worth pursuing (I need to pay rent) but if you'd like to see a tool like this, or if you have any use-cases I didn't mention, please let me know.
I’ve done exactly this for years now. I’m not sure if it actually reduces “blue light” enough to prevent me from triggering my brain’s “it’s daytime” mode, but I figure it’s at least allowing my pupils to stay more dilated (better night vision)<p>Edit: I don’t make a habit of looking at my phone in bed. In addition to the “blue light” there are other things that contribute to wakefulness, such as any voluntary muscle movement (scrolling and tapping) and even just keeping your conscious brain active, which I find I do when I’m interacting with my phone.
This is good advice, but I prefer something that automatically dims and reduces blue light for me. That way I don't have to remember to do it.<p>f.lux on Windows and Mac, and Twilight on Android, are what work for me.<p><a href="https://justgetflux.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://justgetflux.com/</a><p><a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid.lux&hl=en_US&gl=US&pli=1">https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.urbandroid...</a>
This is excellent information! I use my phone in bed, maybe too much, and wished for long time it could go lower. The Kindle app on my iPad will go lower so I knew it was possible. Thank you!
I have no extra dim settings on my Android phone but I've been using Screen Filter since 2011. It's a sub half MB app last updated in 2013 that paints a dark overlay on the screen and makes it darker than the minimum darkness reachable from the brightness slider. Its darkness is configurable and it's pretty much everything it does.
The zoom trick is how you used to have to do it, but then they added reduce white point. When you enable reduce white point, a slider is shown that lets you adjust it, all the way down to almost completely off. I can’t imagine needing to layer zoom on top of it once you reach that level.
On a similar note, you can use the shortcuts app on iphone to make a flashlight toggle that can be set much lower than what can be set through control panel.<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/kNTTlsu.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://i.imgur.com/kNTTlsu.png</a>
I miss this from the original iPhone (or somewhere around iPhone 4) where the system would let you just turn the backlight all the way to off (though it could be hard to turn it back up if you turned off auto brightness).
Moon reader for Android has a built-in feature to set extra-low brightness using something like a full-screen gray/alpha overlay. That, plus white text on a full-screen black background, makes for an extremely dim screen.<p>It only works for reading ebooks (or whatever you can open in the app), which IMO is a huge benefit. I don't want to be scrolling nonsense websites in bed, but I do think a smartphone ebook reader is the least-bright, most comfortable and most ergonomic way to read in bed.
>so it's odd that manufacturers choose the default minimum brightness to be brighter than the sun.<p>The default brightness of a phone is several hundred nits where the sun is 1.6 billion nits.
FYI for iOS users; instead of toggling this through the accessibility tap you can also set up a Shortcut that toggles the white point, or even just toggle it directly from Spotlight on the home screen by searching "white point" and tapping the switch
I just want to be able to turn the screen off on my Pixel 8 when it's on its wireless charging stand at night.<p>The closest I can get to 'off' is this ridiculous setting: Very dim display (for dark rooms).
I did this a few weeks ago and it is a gamechanger. The only bad thing is that it enables me to stay on my phone late at night when I should be sleeping.
Hey, someone had the same idea! This was the first shortcut I actually found useful. I also have it increase the text size since at my preferred white point the text at default can be pretty difficult to read.<p>Then a 2nd shortcut to reverse everything back to how I like it in the daytime.