Google officially announced the Android N developer preview earlier this morning and already there are tons of new things to discover about the software. Among them were some improvements made to the already existing Doze Mode which will see the feature enabled whenever the screen is turned off regardless of whether or not it’s stationary. In addition to that, Google is reintroducing the Night Mode UI color theme that was initially released with the Android M preview last year, but then removed before they actually launched Android 6.0 Marshmallow to the public. The good news is that it’s once again present within the Android software in the dev preview and Google has added another little tweak to accompany it.
While Night Mode would certainly help those that tend to use their phones later in the evening when it’s dark (or for anyone who uses their phones while in bed) changing the color of the UI theme from white to a dark grayish color only takes you so far as the brightness from the display can still affect your sleep thanks to the emission of blue light. With the Android N developer preview, Google is adding in a new option to enable a red filter to the display that gives it a tinted color on top of the UI, which should help to prevent some of or most of the blue light from emitting out from the screen.
This wouldn’t be the first time this was available on Android as there are numerous apps (like Twilight by Urbandroid Team) which allow you to apply similar filters, and Amazon had recently started introducing something like it into their new Kindle Fire tablets with Fire OS 5 as a feature called Blue Shade. With it now present in the Android N developer preview, though, there is a chance this will be something that could stick around to find its way into stock Android, which would be a great option for users to have. At the moment, adjusting the tint only applies a filter of one tint with no mention of whether or not you will be able to adjust the level of tint later on. Should users want a little more control over such things, there are apps available which allow that type of adjustment.