Home > Tech Explained

Getting Rid of the Blue: F.lux and Alternatives for More Devices

By Christopher Harper

If you’ve ever used f.lux or any application like it, you may already know what this article is going to be covering. If you don’t, let me take a moment to explain something about the kind of light emitted by just about every display you use and the effect that light has on you.

The strongest light emitted by your display isn’t necessarily a white light. Instead, that light is more of an extremely bright blue which strains your eyes and also disrupts your sleeping patterns, enabling long nights spent as an insomniac in front of a computer.

Basically, f.lux and other apps like it, like the ones we’ll be covering in this article, effectively reduce eyestrain and help you sleep. Before we get into that, though, let’s talk a bit about how these programs work.

How They Work

Essentially, these applications work to reduce the blue light hitting your eyes by using a color filter that adjusts over the course of the day. During the daytime your screen will look normal, as you move on into the late afternoon and night, though, your screen will gradually take on a warmer color that’s more reminiscent of the paper of an old book than your usual bright white monitor.

This color shift reduces your eyestrain since you’re not constantly looking at superbright light and helps you fall asleep since blue light isn’t disrupting you. Using these programs comes with an unfortunate downside, however; watching movies and videos, as well as viewing pictures and playing video games, will result in your colors being inaccurate. If you do those things often you’ll want to periodically disable these programs if color accuracy is important to you.

Windows, Mac and Linux: f.lux

fluxnothers-fluxlogo

f.lux is the most popular of the bunch, and for good reason. In addition to having great support for the main desktop platforms, there are also beta/developer versions available for mobile devices. (I wouldn’t recommend those.)

As the first one to popularize this concept, f.lux is the one that the others take the most from. Using f.lux’s options, you can adjust your screen tint to fit with your geographical location (so it’s accurate to the sun in your location) and adjust other settings as well, including the ability to toggle it off for an hour.

Android: Twilight

fluxnothers-twilightlogo

There are a few other f.lux-like apps on Android but none quite as good as Twilight.

Twilight is the best f.lux alternative for Android, and it shows. The only downside is that as opposed to f.lux’s more natural orangey filter, Twilight has a strong red tint that’s really hard to miss.

Also, unlike f.lux, Twilight locks some features behind a paywalled Pro version. It only costs a few bucks, but compared to the full-featured free desktop alternative, it does leave a little to be desired.

iOS: Night Shift

fluxnothers-nightshift

While f.lux alternative apps do exist on iOS, they all require you to jailbreak your iPhone and void your warranty. With the latest versions of iOS, Apple instead opted to allow its users to enjoy the benefits of apps like f.lux as a native operating system feature. No paywall, no headaches. It’s just integrated right into the OS, Apple-style.

Conclusion

f.lux was a major step forward for user comfort and health applications, and once it’s reached the point where even a company as big as Apple is integrating its features into their OS, it’s time to take notice.

If you aren’t already using f.lux or an app like it, try it out! I highly recommend it, especially if you’re having trouble sleeping and spend long hours at the computer.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Christopher Harper Avatar
Christopher Harper
I’m a longtime gamer, computer nerd, and general tech enthusiast.

Read next

Bright modern laboratory with computers and technical equipment for research and analysis.
ARPANET sent its first message on 29 October 1969 from a lab at UCLA to a machine at Stanford, and the message was supposed to read ‘LOGIN’ — but the system crashed after the L and the O, meaning the first word ever transmitted over the network that became the internet was, by accident, ‘LO’.
In 1995, Microsoft shipped a cartoon-house interface called Bob, led by Melinda French, who married Bill Gates while it was in development — it demanded twice the memory of a typical home PC, sold roughly 30,000 copies, and was dead within a year, leaving behind the font Comic Sans and the animated assistant that became Clippy.
Stunning underwater shot of tiger sharks swimming among fish in the ocean depths.
The Greenland shark grows about one centimetre a year, does not reach sexual maturity until around age 150, and a specimen carbon-dated by Danish researchers in 2016 was estimated to be at least 272 years old, meaning it was already swimming the North Atlantic when Mozart was composing symphonies.
A person using a smartphone with a green screen surrounded by fresh fruits and vegetables in the kitchen.
When Apple shipped iOS 12 in June 2018, a small feature called Screen Time slipped onto every iPhone with a counter nobody had quite prepared for — a tally of pickups — and within a day Tim Cook was telling CNN the number of times he picked up his own phone was simply too many
Starry night with radio towers and the Milky Way galaxy visible overhead.
When NASA lost contact with the IMAGE satellite in 2005, an amateur radio operator in Canada named Scott Tilley picked up its signal in January 2018 while hunting for a classified spy satellite, and the spacecraft turned out to be still spinning, still powered, and still trying to phone home after 13 years of silence.
Close-up of a smartphone highlighting its modern design on a dark background.
The original iPhone Steve Jobs unveiled in January 2007 could not record video, could not copy and paste text, could not run a single third-party app, and could only reach the internet over 2G — and Jobs spent ninety minutes on stage at Macworld arguing, one missing feature at a time, that every absence was actually a design decision.
In 1965, Joe Sutter’s Boeing team began shaping the 747 around a future they thought would belong to supersonic jets, lifting the cockpit onto a hump so the nose could open for cargo once the giant subsonic passenger plane had outlived its brief moment
Vintage keyboard with tactile buttons paired with a modern digital interface on screen.
Apple’s original 1984 Macintosh keyboard had no arrow keys, no function keys, and no numeric pad because Steve Jobs wanted users to reach for the mouse first. Then Apple quietly sold the missing keys as an accessory.