Been doing this for several years now and it works great (triple click the Home button to dim the screen), but I can't help but wonder if a standalone setting in iOS wouldn't be a better option.

That's interesting, I'll look into it. Using the method outlined in the article I can get it to the point of being almost not being able to see the screen. Though at night once your eyes adjust, I think going even dimmer could be useful.

One downside of either the zoom trick or the reduce whitepoint option is that you won't see the screen dim before the screen locks from inactivity. This occasionally trips me up if I'm having trouble getting past a page quickly enough. I usually work around this by just touching the screen occasionally or increasing the inactivity limit temporarily.

The nonsense Apple users go to for the simplest of features is always mind blowing to me. If they were paying 1/2 the price I'd get it but Apple products just make no sense to me.

Apple device defaults cover 999/1000 use cases absolutely perfectly - for me and apparently most people.

It's no problem creating a weird workaround for the other 1/1000 items.

1/50 for me, though I think the ratio isn't bad

Right. Because Android has it's ultra low brightness setting where? Oh look! It, too, is in Accessibility settings.

Just stop

We actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down. Also Night Light which removes blue light (also in the drop down). These can also be programmed to go on/off at set times (bedtime mode). Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.

> We actually have a slider bar in the quick menu drop down.

You mean like iPhone's Control Center, which is a pull up? There's a large, very clear screen brightness widget...

> Meanwhile, my husband as never been able to locate any of these in an iPhone without the help of this thread.

Aside from the fact that I believe night shift is on by default:

You long press the screen brightness slider (long presses are a common UI function...) and boom, there's two buttons for dark mode and night shift, and below night shift it says "off until (time here")

Or you can type in "night" into the system-wide search and "night shift" pops up as an option?

Or you can google "night mode iphone"?

Your husband being completely helpless isn't the fault of iOS.

You don't need to go to "nonsense." Night mode is built-in to iOS, no software required - and it's Android that is imitating iOS with the accessibility menu, not the other way around. iOS is famous for its accessibility features. Since the early days of MacOS, Apple has always included accessibility features in its software.

For years I've had "make the screen red" as a shortcut to three home button rapid presses.

> Apple products just make no sense to me.

I'm using an iPhone that cost me $300 used when I bought it several years ago, is now six years old, was until a month or so fully supported OS-wise and will continue to get security updates for another year or two, and is plenty fast enough for everything I do. Airdrop is incredibly handy, almost daily, and has no equivalent on the Android side. It backs up automatically to my mac any time it's on wifi and has power, also no equivalent on Android. I have a ton of the data collection turned off in the privacy tab. Half my apps don't know my real email address because I use Apple's email proxy service. iOS integrates nicely with my open-source self-hosted file sync and my open-source password database. The apps on my device collect a lot less data about me, and my device is not incessantly reporting everything it can to Google.

The battery is original and has 75% of its capacity, and battery life is generally excellent. Not a single component in the phone has needed replacement / worn out. The screen is great. The speakers are great. Reception is great. Facetime audio calls are really pleasant with a couple of friends compared to regular phone calls. It never crashes. The Lightning jack still works perfectly, for example - and I don't bother with wireless charging most of the time.

I get that it's nice to prop up one's ego thinking that you're *so much smarter than millions of people who are willing to pay a premium for something, or you can accept that there's a reason people make a choice other than what you do, that they might be different reasons, different priorities, etc.

I've been like you, but now I can't use the modern OLED iPhones because of the PWM flicker.

As someone else already pointed out, this is in addition to the normal brightness control. This is also notably the only settings hack I’ve ever needed since switching to iPhones from Androids about eight years ago, and in the course of replying to this thread I discovered that the hack isn’t even needed anymore since the reduce white point setting has a slider. I was shocked after the switch about how little tweaking I needed to do to have a device I actually enjoyed using.