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Create a shortcut for even lower phone brightness
- rimunroe 3y agoI'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.
- DitheringIdiot 3y agoThat's interesting, I'll look into it. Using the method outlined in the article I can get it to the point of being almost not being able to see the screen. Though at night once your eyes adjust, I think going even dimmer could be useful.
- rimunroe 3y agoOne downside of either the zoom trick or the reduce whitepoint option is that you won't see the screen dim before the screen locks from inactivity. This occasionally trips me up if I'm having trouble reading a page quickly. I usually work around this by just touching the screen occasionally or increasing the inactivity limit temporarily.
- kylebenzle 3y agoThe nonsense Apple users go to for the simplest of features is always mind blowing to me. If they were paying 1/2 the price I'd get it but Apple products just make no sense to me.
- FredPret 3y agoApple device defaults cover 999/1000 use cases absolutely perfectly - for me and apparently most people. It's no problem creating a weird workaround for the other 1/1000 items.
- fomine3 3y ago1/50 for me, though I think the ratio isn't bad
- HumblyTossed 3y agoRight. Because Android has it's ultra low brightness setting where? Oh look! It, too, is in Accessibility settings. Just stop
- domino24 3y agoWe actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down. Also Night Light which removes blue light (also in the drop down). These can also be programmed to go on/off at set times (bedtime mode). Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.
- KennyBlanken 3y ago> We actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down. You mean like iPhone's Control Center, which is a pull up? There's a large, very clear screen brightness widget... > Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread. Aside from the fact that I believe night shift is on by default: You long press the screen brightness slider (long presses are a common UI function...) and boom, there's two buttons for dark mode and night shift, and below night shift it says "off until (time here") Or you can type in "night" into the system-wide search and "night shift" pops up as an option? Or you can google "night mode iphone"? Your husband being completely helpless isn't the fault of iOS.
- KennyBlanken 3y agoYou don't need to go to "nonsense." Night mode is built-in to iOS, no software required - and it's Android that is imitating iOS with the accessibility menu, not the other way around. iOS is famous for its accessibility features. Since the early days of MacOS, Apple has always included accessibility features in its software. For years I've had "make the screen red" as a shortcut to three home button rapid presses. > Apple products just make no sense to me. I'm using an iPhone that cost me $300 used when I bought it several years ago, is now six years old, was until a month or so fully supported OS-wise and will continue to get security updates for another year or two, and is plenty fast enough for everything I do. Airdrop is incredibly handy, almost daily, and has no equivalent on the Android side. It backs up automatically to my mac any time it's on wifi and has power, also no equivalent on Android. I have a ton of the data collection turned off in the privacy tab. Half my apps don't know my real email address because I use Apple's email proxy service. iOS integrates nicely with my open-source self-hosted file sync and my open-source password database. The apps on my device collect a lot less data about me, and my device is not incessantly reporting everything it can to Google. The battery is original and has 75% of its capacity, and battery life is generally excellent. Not a single component in the phone has needed replacement / worn out. The screen is great. The speakers are great. Reception is great. Facetime audio calls are really pleasant with a couple of friends compared to regular phone calls. It never crashes. The Lightning jack still works perfectly, for example - and I don't bother with wireless charging most of the time. I get that it's nice to prop up one's ego thinking that you're *so much smarter than millions of people who are willing to pay a premium for something, or you can accept that there's a reason people make a choice other than what you do, that they might be different reasons, different priorities, etc.
- orloffm 3y agoI've been like you, but now I can't use the modern OLED iPhones because of the PWM flicker.
- rimunroe 3y agoAs someone else already pointed out, this is in addition to the normal brightness control. This is also notably the only settings hack I’ve ever needed since switching to iPhones from Androids about eight years ago, and in the course of replying to this thread I discovered that the hack isn’t even needed anymore since the reduce white point setting has a slider. I was shocked after the switch about how little tweaking I needed to do to have a device I actually enjoyed using.
- jihadjihad 3y agoBeen doing this for several years now and it works great (triple click the Home button to dim the screen), but I can't help but wonder if a standalone setting in iOS wouldn't be a better option.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Ajay-p 3y agoThis 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!
- kylebenzle 3y agoBy "information" you mean the idea that a screen brightness can be adjusted? I am honestly confused if you thought before reading this that pixels were somehow limited by how dim they could get?
- AeroNotix 3y agoIt might come as a shock but sometimes software is imperfect.
- jqr- 3y agoThe post gives instructions on how to lower the brightness below what the slider normally allows. It was useful news to me too.
- peddling-brink 3y agoThis was unnecessarily rude. Did you read the article? It’s about a specific accessibility setting that many won’t have thought to use for this purpose. Pixels that are driven by real hardware and software will be limited in how dim they get.
- bscphil 3y agoThis is not just the backlight setting: below a certain level the feature will darken the level of the pixels so that white (255, 255, 255) is reduced to something darker. On an OLED screen, of course, this just has the effect of allowing lower brightnesses than the phone's minimum, but on backlit screens it still has a surprisingly large effect.
- eternauta3k 3y agoWith FBReader you can slide your finger along the left edge of the screen to adjust brightness, and it goes down to pretty darn dark.
- rationalfaith 3y ago[dead]
- pmontra 3y agoI 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.
- globular-toast 3y agoThe best quality of life improvement I've made in the past few years is to break the phone in bed habit and start a reading habit.
- justin_oaks 3y agoI also found that reading books at night helps me get to sleep better, though I still use my phone for reading them. I suspect that the light of a phone screen matters less than the content you view on the phone.
- globular-toast 3y agoI think it also matters how you interact with said content. Scrolling is really bad as it needs near constant interaction but page turning via taps anywhere on the screen seems to work really well. The screen on my eReader is a way better shape than any phone when it comes to reading books. Add to that the fact they cost a fraction what a phone costs and can't possibly send a notification to keep you awake makes them the superior falling asleep device for me. I also don't need any weird hacks like this to make the screen really dim.
- smegsicle 3y agonow do one for volume
- x-yl 3y agoSoundAssistant on Samsung devices lets you do this as well. It gives you per-app sliders which stack with the main slider allowing you to go below 1% -- or whatever number rounds to "off" on your headphones.
- davio 3y agoOn Mac, Shift Option Volume down lets you do quarter increments. This opens up 3 lower volume options between 1 and off.
- einherjae 3y agoYou can go even further if you open the MIDI settings thing (I don’t remember the exact name, it’s in Utilities). There you can set the per channel volume with 2 digits, giving you 10 steps extra between 0 and 1, as well as balance.
- encypruon 3y agoI did. I have an "Asus Zenfone Max Pro M1" (what a mouthful) and the volume is always too high and the audio ridiculously bad at "low" volumes. Changing some values with ALSA makes it almost bearable. The easiest way I found to do that was to root the phone, compile tinyalsa in termux and use this script to call tinyalsa with root: https://pastebin.com/5f1jwpkb https://pastebin.com/5f1jwpkb If anyone has ideas how to do this without root, get around the issue of calls being lower volume or remove the dependency on tinyalsa and termux, I'm all ears.
- kaldev 3y agoI 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.
- orev 3y agoThe 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.
- rimunroe 3y agoOh that's good to know! I'll switch to using that instead
- charcircuit 3y ago>so it's odd that manufacturers choose the default minimum brightness to be brighter than the sun. The default brightness of a phone is several hundred nits where the sun is 1.6 billion nits.
- chromakode 3y agoOn 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.
- carb 3y agoYou can also (at least on Samsung phones) adjust the "Extra dim shortcut"! I have it set it to "Tap Accessibility button", which is a small person-shaped icon that sits at the very bottom right of my screen, to the right of the Back button.
- bscphil 3y agoLineageOS lets you activate it on a schedule, e.g. 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. I think maybe stock Android does too? This is one of the many areas that Samsung phones suck. For many versions, and for older phones that are mostly stuck on those versions, they hide this Android feature entirely. I managed to get it sort-of working by figuring out the intent name and making a shortcut for it in my launcher. (If you have a brand new Samsung, I don't think this is an issue.)
- digging 3y ago"Night light" can be set on a schedule on GrapheneOS as well so almost certainly stock Android. Didn't realize it was a Pixel thing... such a basic feature.
- CarVac 3y agoOoo, thanks for this. I just set the grayscale filter to a gesture (double finger swipe up from the bottom).
- captn3m0 3y agoI have this, along with “Smart Invert” as my triple-click. It is quite helpful for night time.
- NelsonMinar 3y agoI 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.
- sphars 3y agoPretty sure Macrodroid or Tasker can do this. In Macrodroid, I can set brightness to an integer 0-100 for brightness percentage. Plus, on Pixels at least, there is a setting for Extra Dim (in accessibility settings) which can also probably be set via Macrodroid/Tasker. May need the ADB hack to allow system setting changes though.
- NelsonMinar 3y agohmm I'll try that. I realize now I may need 0-255, which I think is the native measurement in the API. I really do want a very small number over 0; on this Samsung tablet that's what looks right.
- greentea23 3y agoNot for everyone, but this does that perfectly well: https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-brightness https://wiki.termux.com/wiki/Termux-brightness
- pynappo 3y agoI've used the Automate app for doing exactly this, adjusting brightness to slightly above minimum if I set it too low https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.automate https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.llamalab.a...
- copperx 3y agoI'm on the latest Android and there's an "Extra dim" button in the control center.
- OGWhales 3y agoOn 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. https://i.imgur.com/kNTTlsu.png https://i.imgur.com/kNTTlsu.png
- alin23 3y agoWoaaah, always wanted this for searching stuff after bedtime without waking up my wife and dog. Thanks!!!
- vladvasiliu 3y agoIt’s hard to compare how low they go, but long press on the flashlight icon in the control panel allows controlling the brightness.
- artimaeis 3y agoHey, 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. Then a 2nd shortcut to reverse everything back to how I like it in the daytime.
- moneywoes 3y agoIs there a similar trick for mac / windows laptops? Would really help working late at night
- timenova 3y agoThere's no Reduce White Point on Mac as far as I am aware. However, you can use the fantastic Lunar [0] app to achieve this, as it supports "Sub-Zero Dimming". To use it, I think you just need to start Lunar, and then press the Reduce Brightness button on your keyboard until it goes below the minimum Mac allows. [0] https://lunar.fyi https://lunar.fyi
- Given_47 3y agoLove lunar. Dev is super responsive and it has a pretty feature-full cli tool as well which makes it easy to script
- bajsejohannes 3y agohttps://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/ can do that (as well as control brigthness on external monitors)
- citruscomputing 3y agoFor Mac, Lunar (brew install --cask lunar) gives "sub-zero dimming" that works perfectly -- it hooks into the brightness keys and gives a whole second, lower menu. The lowest setting is actually too dim (as any lowest non-zero brightness setting should be...) Works for external monitors, too!
- w-ll 3y agohttps://www.pangobright.com/ https://www.pangobright.com/ on windows is great, albeit a little weird. I think it makes a transparent always on top window that doesnt take events. System right click menus and stuff seem to no be under it. But I still like this over flux and the likes
- roughly 3y agoThe other useful vision accessibility setting is "Color Filters" - I've used this one two different ways. 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. 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. If you haven't spent time in the accessibility settings, though, go exploring. It's where Apple puts all the good stuff.
- otteromkram 3y agoAndroid (at least version 12) has a bedtime mode that converts the display to B&W. There's also an eye comfort shield feature. However, I stick to using the Blue Light Filter Android app, which is amazing. Not sure if it's available for iOS.
- HPsquared 3y agoOn Samsung at least, you can set a key shortcut to enable B&W mode. I try and use it most of the time, and the shortcut makes it easy to see things in colour if needed.
- capitainenemo 3y agoYou might not have noticed, but check for the button called "Extra Dim" in your Samsung top area quick controls. It's not enabled by default but allows toggling additional dimming. You can customise it in settings to control the level of dimming, adding a a screen or key shortcut, and control whether it activates on phone reboot or not. Key shortcut (or deactivate on reboot) can be helpful if you set it way up, and have adaptive brightness off, and it is a sunny day. (oh, and yeah, it does work nicely with B&W mode and blue light filter modes - all 3 are quite helpful for reading in bed without staying up too late)
- jt2190 3y agoI’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) 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.
- crystaln 3y agoEven 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. It can be hard to operate if you turn the blue leds off entirely but you don’t need much. 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 https://www.blockbluelight.com/blogs/news/how-to-turn-your-i....
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rpastuszak 3y agoheh, just made a comment about a similar approach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38165214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38165214
- dylan604 3y agoI use some of the astro apps like Star Walk and the like, and there's a glaring issue with their internal red modes. When you need to input text, it uses the OS keyboard which is no longer red filtered. It is very jarring when out in the dark. Do the filters you're suggesting also tint the keyboard?
- rpastuszak 3y agoHa, I've been working on some similar projects in the past couple of weeks! (Although I was aiming for a much, much darker screen.) Here are my design/dev notes: https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires https://untested.sonnet.io/Obsidian+for+Vampires https://untested.sonnet.io/Night+Rider https://untested.sonnet.io/Night+Rider The idea to work on this was partially inspired by stargazing apps, e.g. NightSky. 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.
- WesolyKubeczek 3y agoUsing it all the time, also applying a red tint.
- 3seashells 3y agoWish the auto adjust brightness would track pupils and detect readability that way.
- ComputerGuru 3y agoI 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).
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- alanbernstein 3y agoMoon 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. 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.
- jmercouris 3y agoWhile this is great, it reduces the contrast noticeably, and can make lots of text difficult to read.
- oblio 3y agoAny trick for Android to set a temporary mute? 1-2 hours.
- Rebelgecko 3y agoSomewhere in Settings, Android lets you set a default timeout for how long DND mode stays enabled. If you want to mess with just ringtone volume, should be doable via Tasker or maybe even the built in Routines
- rtcoms 3y ago> Any trick for Android to set a temporary mute? 1-2 hours. Moto phone have actions in built where if one puts phone upside down and phone goes on silent
- andyjohnson0 3y agoThis 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. f.lux on Windows and Mac, and Twilight on Android, are what work for me. https://justgetflux.com/ https://justgetflux.com/ 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...
- adamomada 3y agoIt’s built-in to MacOS for years now, look for Night Shift in Display settings
- rch 3y agoI just want to be able to turn the screen off on my Pixel 8 when it's on its wireless charging stand at night. The closest I can get to 'off' is this ridiculous setting: Very dim display (for dark rooms).
- camila45 3y ago[flagged]
- cowjan 3y agoFYI 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
- camila45 3y ago[flagged]
- Elena120 3y ago[dead]
- chidi0202 3y ago[dead]