Cell Phone Glow Keeping you Awake? Try Lux Auto Brightness for Android

I have trouble sleeping sometimes, and it drives my girlfriend absolutely crazy.

You see, it’s not just that I can’t sleep, it’s that I violently toss, turn, and twirl around the bed until I run out of energy and finally crash. After a long day of sitting in-front of the screen, my mind is often racing. There’s even a name for this – Onset Insomnia – and I’ve talked about it before. In my previous article I discussed two of my favorite ways to reduce onset insomnia, such as reading a book of fiction, and more importantly, using an app to control screen color and brightness. More on this in a moment…

Ow, my Eyes? Lux to the Rescue!

Ever noticed how it’s a lot more difficult to fall asleep after you’ve been sitting in your bed for a half hour browsing Reddit on your Galaxy S4 phone? There’s a reason for that: the screen is bright, it’s slightly blue, and it closely mimics daylight. If you’re on a computer, there’s an excellent app to change color temperature and brightness when darkness falls (which I covered in that previous article), but until recently there hasn’t been anything like it for Android phones.

Android phones like the Xperia Z or even my slightly dated, but super awesome, Galaxy Nexus, all have functionality to adjust screen brightness based on ambient light, but frankly… they kind of blow. The built in functionality simply isn’t responsive enough for changing light conditions, and more importantly, it completely lacks the ability to change the color temperature of the screen from (and I’m simplifying here) a blue tone, to something warmer at night. What we want is for the screen color to match say, a camp fire, or a torch, not the blaring blue light of daytime. Our eyes interpret that as WAKE UP IT’S TIME TO DO STUFF NO SLEEPING FOR YOU FRIEND!!!

But what can do that? Well, there’s one app called Lux Auto Brightness that you can find on the Android Marketplace that handles the task quite nicely. It efficiently adjusts the screen brightness based on lighting conditions, and as day creeps into night, so too does the color temperature change to match that. You simply input what region of the world you live in, and the app determines what time the sun sets. The only problem is that it costs money, to the tune of a few dollars. As an insomniac I found the minor cost completely worthwhile, but if you aren’t so sure, then there’s also a free, slightly stripped down version of the app on the marketplace as well.

Thoughts? Questions?

Are you a fellow insomniac, or even just a phone tinkerer looking to try out yet another unusual app? If so, give Lux a try and let me know what you think in the comments below. I’ll even reply to your comments and everything!