Evidence suggests that too much light before bed disrupts your circadian rythrms. Some people believe that blue light in particular is the cause but I think the case for that is shaky, and that it makes more sense by far to cut down on all wavelengths.
Now hold on, you say, my phone comes with a brightness slider already.
True. But I've found that in absolute darkness I can't get my phones dark enough with built in controls.
Enter
Screen Filter, a free app that can make your screen dark. I mean really, really dark. You'll very quickly realize why your built-in brightness slider isn't doing enough: they are protecting you from yourself. In a bright room you can easily set the screen so dark you can't see anything. Including how to make it brighter again. Luckily they take a page from a bygon era of PCs, and automatically restore the screen to normal unless you confirm your setting within 10 seconds.
This app is free, has no ads, and works really well. I strongly recommend it for night time use. You might also be tempted to hope you could save battery life by turning down the brightness this way, but that's going to be hit or miss. If you have an OLED display that will probably work. If your display has a backlight, however, your battery probably won't benefit. This program works by inserting itself into the display pipeline, decreasing the pixel values just before rendering them to the LCD. Power consumption depends on the backlight, not pixel values. A side effect is that extreme levels of light reduction reduces the dynamic range of your display. In practice I haven't noticed this much, and even if it were worse it's a small price to pay for better sleep.
This app makes it easy to count something (reps, in my case) while using any app. If it looks familiar, it's because I previously reviewed an almost identical app that differed in how you closed the bubble and reset the count. I like the gesture based interface of this version better. The picture at right shows the settings but to be clear after you close that the green counter remains for you to position where you please. Free/no ads, but there's a paid version with more features which you should probably buy to support the developer!
