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The iPhone will finally stop ruining your sleep with this new feature

night shift
Apple/Screenshot

Apple's next version of iOS, the mobile operating system for the iPhone and iPad, will make your Apple devices a bit less jarring to use at night.

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iOS 9.3, which is already available to developers and should be available to the general public soon, comes with Night Shift. When you activate Night Shift, the colors on your device's display change depending on the time of day — they become "warmer" as the sun goes down and it gets dark, and go back to "normal" when the sun rises in the morning.

This decreases the blue light emitted by your device's screen. Studies have shown that being exposed to blue light at night may confuse your brain and make it harder to fall and stay asleep.

A popular app called f.lux, which is available for Mac, PC, and Linux, has been adjusting the color temperature on desktops and laptops for years. (f.lux actually had a version for the iPhone, but Apple told f.lux it violated the company's terms, so f.lux shut it down in November.)

I absolutely love f.lux. As I wrote last month, I can't imagine using my computer without it.

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I expect Night Shift on the iPhone to be just as great as f.lux on the computer. For better or for worse, many of us tend to look at our phones right before we fall asleep before bed, whether it's to set an alarm, read an article, or browse social media, and I welcome anything that could possibly make this less disturbing on our bodies.

Even though f.lux is no longer on iPhone, the f.lux website has a simulation of how much blue light was removed from the iPhone's display when you used the app on an iPhone 6.

Here are the colors emitted by the phone's display when f.lux isn't enabled:

Screen Shot 2016 01 11 at 3.38.59 PM
Screenshot/f.lux

And here are the colors emitted when f.lux is enabled:

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flux screenshot
f.lux/Screenshot

As my colleague Melia Robinson wrote in her own review of f.lux earlier this year, "there is plenty of research that analyzes blue light's effects, but less — though still some — on lower temperate screen color effects on sleep. Further testing is required."

flux side by side
Melia Robinson / Tech Insider

Here's what a MacBook Pro display looks like with and without f.lux enabled:

Apple
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