Apple’s New ‘Night Shift’ Feature For iPhone Should Help You Sleep Better

By @TheMarkDalton.

Many of us use iPhones or iPads in bed before falling asleep either to see whats happening on a social network before going to sleep or having a read of some news articles or links that have been saved throughout the day on Pocket. However, as we pointed out yesterday, this is not a good thing and can affect your sleeping pattern.

It is not so much the fact you are looking at a screen late that keeps your brain awake, it is actually because the screen blasts blue light into your eyeballs and that is what tends to disrupt the night time sleeping pattern.

A new feature has appeared in the latest iOS beta (9.3) called Night Shift and it allows users to automate changing the colour temperature of the devices display and move the display to the warmer end of the colour spectrum thus blasting less blue light into your eyes before going to bed.

The feature can be enabled by heading over to Settings > Display & Brightness and then activated via the “Blue Light Reduction” menu found here. You can manually adjust if you want a cooler or warmer temperature and then you can decide on the intensity of how cool or warm you want the display to be.

You can then set up times for the blue light reduction feature by enabling it from sunrise to sunset or by creating your own custom schedule. Here is an idea of what the feature looks like in action from Mashable’s Karissa Bell.

For many people this will seem like a small feature which is relatively unimportant. However it is difficult to overstate just how much a difference changing the colour temperature can make when you are doing something such as reading. Of course there are times when it may not be appropriate and you may want to turn it off, for example if you are editing photos.

I’m hoping that Apple will build a switch for blue light reduction into the control centre which will allow users to quickly and easily flip blue light reduction on and off. However I would imagine we won’t see anything like this arriving in iOS 9.

The feature is not available for the public yet and iOS 9.3 will more than likely not be ready for some number of weeks, however if you want to get your hands on it early you can sign up for the public beta here. The iOS 9.3 public beta has not been released yet however we are expecting it over the coming days. But be warned: beta software can be unstable, have bugs and sometimes poor battery life so think about it how much you want these new features before installing beta software on a primary device.

Ideally, beta software should only be downloaded and used on secondary devices.