Android 7.0’s new Night Light feature is included in both the Pixel and Pixel XL, and you can follow these steps to enable the feature.
There are a number of studies that believe the blue light emitting from our smartphones, tablets and even television sets make it difficult for some people to sleep at night. Some researchers point to the connected lifestyle as the reason why so many people are having difficulty sleeping.
Some disagree with this, but a number of studies have been done that suggest it can have a negative effect on our sleeping habits.
This can also strain your eyes if you’re looking at a display for an extended period of time. So to combat this, some software like f.lux can be used to eliminate the blue light from your desktop monitor, but what about smartphones and tablets? There are a couple of apps that will help resolve the issue, and I actually did a review of Chainfire’s CF.lumen application a while back.
Now though, Google has decided to bake the feature into the core Android OS, and it is currently available on the Pixel and Pixel XL.
Pixel Night Light
- Launch the Settings application
- Scroll down and tap on the ‘Display’ option
- Tap on the ‘Night Light’ option
- Choose if you want to manually toggle it on, or schedule it to turn on/off
Explanation
Once you know where the feature is located, it’s actually very easy to toggle on and off. There are a few ways you can do this too. So, to locate the feature, you’ll first need to launch the Settings application. From here, you should scroll down a bit and then tap on the Display option from within the Settings. Then, toward the top of the screen you should see an option called Night Light.
Tapping on this option is all you need to do and then you can start setting the feature up. Firstly, there is a Status section with a simple manual toggle for Night Light. By default this is set to off, and all you have to do is tap the toggle and it will instantly turn Night Light mode on. You should instantly see a red tint cover the screen once the feature is turned off. This can definitely be jarring at first and you’ll likely feel there’s no way that you can use a phone like this.
However, it’s not that bad and your eyes will actually get used to it the more you use it. I promise. I use f.lux on my monitor and have been for years. Even after about an hour of the feature turned on (which only gets turned on after sunset), your eyes just get used to it. Now, this isn’t to say that you won’t notice it, because you still will. But it does prevent your eyes from being strained by looking at it. After an hour of using f.lux at night, I can turn it off and instantly feel my eyes hurting because of how the color temperature changes.
As shown in the image above, you don’t have to dive into the Settings application to manually toggle this Night Light feature on or off. Google has actually added a Quick Settings tile for to use if that is your preferred way of using the feature. This is fair as there are some who do not want the phone to automatically adjust the color temperature when they aren’t expecting it. So this title is there and you can toggle it on or off at your choosing.
For those who don’t want to be bothered with manually turning the Pixel Night Light feature on and off, you also have the ability to set a schedule for it. My favorite, and the one I use on f.lux, is to automatically enable Night Light when the sun sets. This means it will use the timezone that is currently set on the Pixel or Pixel XL and automatically enable the feature once it knows the sun has set (thanks to weather data).
This feature will then turn off once the phone knows the sun has risen (which is again, thanks to weather data). Alternatively, you also have the option to set a custom schedule for when you want the Pixel Night Light feature turned on and off. For example, if you sleep during the day because you work at night (or because you’re just a night person), then you can set a custom time when you want this feature to be turned on and off.
I appreciate that Google has baked this feature into the core Android OS because it seems like something they would prefer Android OEMs to implement themselves.
