NightLightDarkroom

When I recently got a new phone, the Pixel 3a, I found that the screen was quite intense to use late at night, unlike my previous phone. To help alleviate this, I created a simple Android app to emulate the “Darkroom” mode of f.lux, which shows just the red channel of all colours.

The app adds a quick-settings tile to toggle this behaviour, with a simple settings app, which works by setting the system Night Light feature to a colour temperature of 0K. This isn’t usually supported by default, in fact the lowest colour temperature supported by default on my Pixel 3a was ≈2600K, which was personally far too high and reduced the effectiveness of the blue light filter significantly. To solve this, I created a module for the root solution Magisk which overrides the minimum temperature option set by the ROM creator.

This was the first Android app I wrote from scratch, so it further broadened my knowledge of developing for Android that I had already gained from working on open source projects such as Vinyl Music Player. It also taught me many things about the internal workings of Android when creating the Magisk module, which I found particularly interesting.

Both the Darkroom app and Magisk module are open-source and available for download on GitHub.