List of changes to consider this ticket closed:

• [x] Bump to v2.7.0 :smiley:
• [x] Snack bar when top switch is disabled
  • [x] More contrast with dark theme.
• [x] Remove all drop-down actions in notification except pause/resume.
  • Tapping the text will still open the app.
  • Alternative: replace the 'close' button with "pause for X minutes"
    • There's probably a good way to show this with an icon; I'm not sure what that should look like.
    • When the filter is temporarily paused, the notification text should read "Paused for [X] minutes"
    • If there are 15 or fewer seconds left, "Paused for [X] seconds."
    • Hitting "Pause for X minutes" while the filter is paused will reset the pause time to X minutes.
• [x] Add FAB that toggles pause/resume.
  • [x] The FAB should not be visible when the app bar switch is off
  • [x] Animate the FAB appearing and disappearing like this.
• APP BAR SWITCH
  • [x] When it's off, all settings except "Dark theme", "Visit the project page", and "Email me..." are grayed out and inaccessible.
    • [x] The ADD button should also gray out to reflect that it is not clickable.
    • [x] The three moons should all gray out.
  • [x] When it's off, the notification should not appear.
  • [x] Pausing or resuming the filter via notification or FAB does not change the position.
  • [x] When switched on, the filter should start paused.
    • For this release; the end goal is more nuanced behavior; see #34.
• [x] Add "Location" setting below "turn off time"
  • Grayed out unless "Toggle filter automatically" is set to "sun"
  • Secondary text reads "Lat: ##.## Long: ##.##"
    • If location has never been set, Secondary text reads "Not set"
  • Tapping the setting attempts to update the location.
    • Updates toggle times if location update is successful.
    • [x] If it fails, it shows an error message "Enable location services to update location"
      (Replace the current message starting with "location service isn't enabled...")
• [x] In "sun" mode, secondary text for "Turn filter off" and "Turn filter on" shows in-use (not custom) times.
  • The custom times should still be saved & restored if the user returns to using the custom times.
• [x] Setting "Toggle filter automatically" to "sun" immediately sets toggle times to a reasonable default
  • One suggestion in #5 is approximating sunset/sunrise times based on time zone.
  • [x] In "sun" mode, each time the filter is automatically toggled, Red Moon attempts to update location.
    • This attempt fails or succeeds silently.
    • If it succeeds, updates toggle times, too.
    • No change if it fails.
• [x] Remove "Keep running after reboot" setting
  • The service, if enabled, should always stay running after reboot.
• [x] Remove "Contact" header (move these settings under "Other")

The rest of this comment is out of date. It may still be useful for context.

Some of this (anything quoted) is pulling from the Material guidelines (settings and selection controls). The rest is from my experience as a UX designer (in training).

1. Clarify the how users interact with the app

Add a FAB & change notification, the top-level switch, startup settings, & the automatic filter backend.

I wrote out a bunch of reasons why the current behavior is confusing, but they're cluttering this section so I moved them down to the bottom of this post ⁰ so here we can focus on solutions.

The user doesn't distinguish between the service and the filter. They only care about 3 questions:

• Am I interested in using Red Moon? Probably yes, but this setting should exist so the app can easily be completely disabled without uninstalling it. It's changed so infrequently that it doesn't need to exist outside the app.
  • Do I want Red Moon running right now? Ie, they want to be able to manually stop the service.
    • What parameters should it run under? Both filter parameters and timing. The user configures these (in a profile) and then forgets about it. Maybe occasionally they'll switch profiles. If they're constantly tweaking profile settings, we're doing something wrong or there's a feature we're lacking.

So here's a state hierarchy:

1. Red Moon disabled
2. Red Moon enabled
   1. Filter paused
   2. Filter on
      1. Profile a
      2. Profile b
      3. etc

Each indentation level is a layer of abstraction, and we have controls at each layer. If you mix layers, you'll end up with settings in places that don't make sense¹.

The user doesn't care if Red Moon is able to turn off the service in the background, nor if the service starts on boot or if service is able to restart across reboots -- they only care what state the app is in. So the question becomes, where do we control elements of each state, and which states should persist across reboot? Here are my conclusions:

Remove both 'Startup' settings. They both have to do with implementation details that users don't care about.

• If a user wants a filter that they have to manually enable and disable that's on after every reboot, they'll already be using a profile where the filter is always on and just pause it manually.

The top-level switch should enable/disable Red Moon. Its state should persist across reboot.

• The only way to toggle this setting is tapping the slider in the app.
  • control via intent can happen at a higher level
  • Remove the 'close' button from the notification. It would be too easy for a user to disable Red Moon when they intended to turn off the filter. If you want to keep this button, repurpose it. See the 2nd comment in this thread.

Add a FAB that pauses and resumes the filter. Its state should not persist across reboot.

• If Red Moon is disabled, the FAB will enable it as well as resuming the filter.
• The 'pause' button in the drop-down notification will have identical behavior, except it'll never be shown while Red Moon is disabled.
• If you use this button while Red Moon is disabled (state 1), it will enable red moon and turn the filter on.

Changes to the filter settings get their own section at the bottom.

2. Change "Dark theme" to a switch and remove the secondary text.

Secondary text is optional. If the label is sufficient on its own, don't add a secondary text description. [...] If you have a single option, avoid using a checkbox and use an on/off switch instead.

"Dark theme" is pretty universally understood.

Switches are pretty overrated; they're often more confusing than a checkbox would be. That said, they have their place on lone settings or when changing the setting has an immediate effect (like toggling wifi or switching theme). Dark theme is both.

3. Shuffle around settings under the 'automatic filter' header

For non-switch settings, secondary text should show the current status of a setting only.

The first 3 lines mimic Twilight's interface. 'Location' should be smaller than Twilight's and only show the coordinates in its secondary text.

~~Automatic filter~~ Filter times

• {Always | Sun | Custom}
  [slider bar for viewing current times or setting them if 'custom' is selected]
• Location
  [coordinates]

'Location' opens up a new activity that guides you through the process of picking your location. That screen has 4 options:

• Automatic (accurate)
  Requires location services
• Automatic (approximate)
  Estimate location from system date/time
• Enter coordinates
• Search by city

0: It should be possible to understand how all settings will affect behavior without actually testing out different combinations of settings. It boils down to whether there a difference between a filter that's on but paused and a disabled filter. Ie, can the service be running and the filter be disabled? Related questions that follow:

• Does the notification showing mean the service is running or that the filter is on?
• If I have I have automatic filter times set but I pause the filter, will the filter turn on at sunset or be paused indefinitely?
• Does the top level switch start and stop the filter or the service?
• Does the 'automatic filter' setting start and stop the filter or the service?
• Does the stop button in the notification stop the service or filter?

My best guesses for the answers are:

• The notification tells whether the service is running or not, as does the switch.
• The filter turns on when the service starts, but can be paused through the notification.
• Automatic filter toggles the service on and off.

Could you explain what the actual relationship between filter and service is? If it's different enough from my guess that implementing my suggestions would be difficult, I'll make some modifications.

1: It's pretty clear that the team behind Twilight did their homework for the design, but they got lost in the details. They decided "always on" should be at the manual-intervention level; I think it's a profile setting. They also decided "filter times" should be a global setting, when I think it's also a profile setting. Changing it is larger-scope than this ticket, though. I am only including changes here that I think should be uncontroversial.

This is the continuation of #88. It fixes some or all of #36, #70, #88, #90, #94.

This has become a really big PR, but it should be clear what I've changed if you look at it commit by commit (with the exception of ed27961, because android studio added the new kotlin files to git without asking).

TODO:

• [x] Bugfix: Crashes when trying to get location permission on emulator, api 21.
  • This turned out to maybe just be an emulator bug. The emulator didn't have a network location provider. Keeping the fix in, just in case, and because it includes better logging.
• [x] Bugfix: toggling the theme scrolls back to the top of the activity instead of maintaining scroll position.
• [x] Re-add a pref just for updating the location. I tried to find a way to replace it with a toggle entirely, but there's just no way. If you give a prominent notice that you're updating the location, it feels too invasive ("Why does Red Moon need to know my location right now?) but if you don't give a prominent notice, the app feels like it's missing a way to update the location.
  • We can probably fix this when we add a way to manually set the location, in another sub-screen. But that's more work than I want to do right now.
• [x] Re-enable location; pull location updating out into its own service so the app doesn't need to stay in the foreground while the location updates.
• [x] Re-enable ShadesPresenter (the fragment approach plus null safety breaks it) / replace it with eventbus
• [x] Better interface for ScreenFilterService
• [x] Bug: Turning on Secure Suspend always pauses. Introduced in 8d97285
• [x] Bug: Preview doesn't work if you start changing setting while filter is turning off.
  • [x] And other weirdness with turning the filter on and off the first time you open the app
• [x] Bug: Changing settings doesn't cause the profile spinner to change to 'custom'
• [x] Allow turning the filter back on while it's in the middle of turning off
  • There is a more elegant fix to this that doesn't cause it to flash completely off, which involves moving openScreenFilter() and closeScreenFilter() into ScreenFilterView. I just want to get this merged, though, so I'll do the easy/brittle fix for now.
• [x] Bug: Timer doesn't go on
  • ScheduleNextCommand seems to work correctly, but onRecieve never gets called. The receiver had accidentally been removed from the manifest during the rename.
• [x] Bug: Sometimes two screen filters can get started.
  • This can also be reproduced by repeatedly using the toggle widget, with amusing results.
    • Toggle on works, but toggle off does not (although Red Moon thinks it does), so the next time you turn it on, now you've got two filters running.
    • If you put a phone in developer mode, you can see that when started this way, the filter does not show up as a service, but as a background process. When you swipe it away in the app history, the filter will turn off.
  • Toggling on seems to work fine. Toggling off is not actually turning the filter off.
• [x] Clean up android studio warnings and remove unused imports
• [x] Add my name to copyright notice in modified files

Not going to do these now:

• show the on & off times in the Automatic toggle summary
  • We'll need to add additional strings.
  • I'm unsure what's needed to work with RTL locales.
  • If we end up doing #106, not sure how we'd display that.
  • How big of a deal is it that we don't display them?
• Bug: crashes when turning on filter if permission to draw over other apps is not granted:
  • This is also present in the live app (#85) so I'm going to say it's not in scope of this MR.
  • Solution will be to do the checks for permission in the screenfilterpresenter. If the check fails, post a message to the event bus. That way, if the app is open, it'll receive the event and can launch a dialog asking for permissions; if the app isn't open, it'll fail silently. We can use this approach for other permissions, too, if appropriate.
• Make getting a new location more reliable.
  • This is also present on live (#102).
• Clean up compilation warnings / add eventbus subscriber index / modify Lint for kotlin
  • These are nice-to-haves, but they don't prevent the application from running. I'd like to do them before the next release, but I just want to get merged to master so I don't have to keep maintaining what's essentially a fork. Plus when I know I'm making individual MRs and not working on one big one, my commits are much cleaner.
• Bugfix: Secure Suspend doesn't work on Galaxy S6, api 23
  • The current app monitoring thread fails to recognize the package installer as secured.
  • Suspect this is a Samsung problem, as it works on an api 23 emulated device.
  • Verified that this also happens on the live app, so this is not a regression -> wontfix

First, thanks for the great work in this app!

After updating to 3.1.1 the redmoon-tile in the "swipe down drawer" stopped working. After the update to 3.1.2 I cannot launch the app at all.

How could retrieve the relevant crash logs for you?

Moto Z, Android 7.1.1, kernel 3.18.31

LineageOS 14.1. Android 7.1.2. Red Moon (F-Droid) 2.10.2.

When the device is idle for a long time, the timer does not work. The filter does not "start" and "stop".

To test this, force the device in idle (Doze) mode and wait for the "start" or "stop" event:

adb shell dumpsys deviceidle force-idle

Possible fix: allow the timer's alarm also to operate in idle mode for newer devices (by calling alarmManager.setExactAndAllowWhileIdle(), SDK API 23):

File TimeToggleChangeReceiver.kt

if (atLeastAPI(23)) {
    alarmManager.setExactAndAllowWhileIdle(AlarmManager.RTC, calendar.timeInMillis, pendingIntent)
} else if (atLeastAPI(19)) {
    alarmManager.setExact(AlarmManager.RTC, calendar.timeInMillis, pendingIntent)

This seems to work after some quick testing.

successfully built all four different apk variants (fdroid and playstore, both debug and release) with these changes

i can provide them if you wish to test them

App Version: 2.10.2 from F-droid. Android Version: Android 6.0 in Huawei P8 Lite with EMUI 4.0.

I don't know if i'm doing something wrong.

I can switch on/off the red filter with the general button in the app, but i can't make it work automaticly with the time function. It's activated and i put manual and automatic time (it picks the right time for my time zone) but the red filter only works with the general button, and the time function doesn't matter, the red filter has never activates or deactivates with the times configured.

My phone has default function to don't keep alive apps, but Red Moon is configured as protected app and this shouldn't be a problem.

And, well, i know is not the same, but Twilight App works with automatic switch on/off, but i think the red filter in Red Moon fits better in my phone. Only for pointing that.

Thanks in advance.

Adding an option to turn off status bar notifications would be a welcome improvement, so that once Red Moon is set up, it can be left alone to run in the background.

Hi there, Maybe related to #128 (also began with 2.10.0 on Fairphone 1 (although Android 4.2.2), but not resolved with 2.10.1 update)

The timer is switching the filter on and off successfully but the master switch does not turn the filter on or deactivate it when the timer has activated it. Peculiar is that adjustment of the filter settings temporarily adds the overlay until the slider is released, whether the master switch is on or off.

Reinstalling hasn't solved this.

Great app and thank you

On f-droid, there are 3 screen filter apps that all do more or less the same thing:

• Night Light @corphish
• Night Screen by @fython
• Red Moon (duh) by myself and @raatmarien

And some apps that have partial overlap:

• OpenShift by @joonatoona
• Dimmer (no longer maintained?) by @giraffine
• Suntimes by @forrestguice

It seems like a waste of effort to have so many of us working independently on the same kinds of issues. Are any of you interested in merging our apps, or collaborating in some other way (eg, refactoring some functionality into libraries we could share)?

edit: We're all GPLv3 (or GPLv3+), so we can freely combine our code.

Hi there !

I happily discovered Red Moon as an alternative to Twilight on F-Droid.

However, automatic turn-on/turn at custom times does not seem to work : I set it to run between 20:00 and 06:00, but it did not stop at 06:00.

Also, I'm not quite sure what the two startup options do ("Keep running after reboot" and "Alway open on startup") : do they mean that Red Moon doesn't normally start at boot to monitor automatic turn on/off times, and that reboot behaves differently than normal boot ?

The feature disabling button backlight is fine, but it has as a side-effect: it disables keyboard backlight on devices with a physical QWERTY keyboard, which renders the keyboard almost unusable (it is hard to touch type on a mobile keyboard).

Please make this function optional.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Grant the app root privileges
2. Enable the filter
3. Unistall the app
4. Enable system blue light filter
5. Reboot
6. Your device is now bricked (dm-verity device corrupted force dump kernel_restart)

Additional description/details (optional) Add any other context about the problem here.

It may be a very peculiar situation but, really, who might expected such a thing?! I had to wipe all my data and reinstall a clean version of Android.

Maybe a warning could have been useful.

Device info:

• Red Moon version (under Red Moon settings): 8.1
• Android version (under Settings > About device): 12.1
• Device: OnePlus 8T

The problem: With astigmatism, bright things bloom out, blur, and glow, obscuring neighboring elements that are darker. When the entire screen is darkened the effect seems to worsen.

Concept for solution: Darken the brighter things more.

As I understand it, the darkening is an overlayed red image rather than adjusting the color settings of the display, which should allow for different values at different regions of the screen.

If the current screen content can be captured by a program and detect areas that are brighter than their surroundings, then perhaps the overlayed red image could be modified to be darker or more opaque in that area to even out the brightness of the screen. Like tonemapping. With some degree of smoothing between values, either by lerping the current overlay to the new overlay a little bit each time the screen is captured, or something more reactive that works faster to darken and slower to lighten, or the other way around.

I don't know what Android will actually allow though, but I'm pretty sure it's a pipe dream.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Install KeePassXD and Red Moon
2. Enable Red Moon filter
3. Open KeePassXD

Expected behavior:

Interaction with KeePassXD interface is possible

Actual behavior

KeePassXD look like freeze because no touchscreen interaction is possible when application is on screen. Keyboard interaction is still possible. If Red Moon filter is disable, interaction is back.

Device info:

• Red Moon version: [v4.0.0]
• KeyPassXD: v3.5.0 Beta01
• Android version: [13]

Steps To Reproduce

1. Open Einstellungen
2. press on Anfangszeit or Endzeit

Expected behavior: Posibility to change time

Actual behavior: Red moon dies

Additional description/details (optional) Add any other context about the problem here.

Device info:

• Red Moon version (under Red Moon settings): v4.0.0
• Android version (under Settings > About device): 6.0.1
• Device: SM-A300FU

Actual behavior: [What actually happened.]

With red moon turned on and paused, the filter resumes every time I cross the border between two countries (in my case from France to Belgium to the Netherlands to Germany)

Expected behavior: [What you expected to happen.]

The filter should have remained paused.

Additional details

• Filter: Custom
• Schedule: None
• Lower system brightness: unchecked
• Pause in excluded apps: off
• Hardware button back light: turn off

Device info:

• Red Moon version (under Red Moon settings): [v3.5.0]
• Android version (under Settings > About device): [10]
• Device: [Lenovo P2a42]

I'm not going to pretend that this is the finest code I've written, but this should be daily-usable and I want to prevent as much eye-searing as possible among our Android 12 users. This should be in a reasonable state to build upon as well.

It adds a link in the settings to the accessibility services page, and will always use the accessibility service instead of a standard overlay when said service is enabled. It all goes through the existing FilterService, so it should work with all the possible ways one can toggle and set filters.

Good news:

• Covers up everything (home screen, notifications, navigation, incl. notches/cutouts) on every API level tested 7/11/12L/13 + 11 IRL device
• Appears to work with the scheduling thing (not very extensively tested)
• Miraculously fixed the busted vibration motor on my phone (not kidding)

Bad news:

• Is not animated (I think this can be added though)
• Probably doesn't work with the privileged app monitor (can also probably be added later)
• Some stuff is hardcoded b/c I can't seem to get info about cutouts or screen size on the newer API levels (ScreenManager uses a bunch of deprecated stuff)
• Didn't bother to make it particularly discoverable; maybe we should add this to the welcome slideshow if we detect you're running Android 12+ at some later point

Resolves #309 Resolves #253 Resolves #252 Resolves #312 Resolves #236 (repro'd + confirmed fixed on Android 11) Probably Resolves #234 Probably Resolves #277