Creators of banned f.lux sleep improvement app call on Apple to open up Night Shift, claim they are the "original innovators"

A feature spotlight in the upcoming iOS 9.3 release is the addition of Night Shift, a system service designed to let your iPhone or iPad adjust its screen color temperature in accordance with the natural "circadian rhythm". Its main accomplishment is reducing the emissions of blue light, which tends to mess with melatonin production and prevent you from having a good night's sleep. It also makes the screen color temperature match that of your ambient lighting, greatly reducing eye strain.

Reiterating Apple's commitment to health and providing a genuinely useful bit of functionality to iOS users, Night Shift is a welcome addition for sure, but it's no secret that it's not entirely innovative. Applications such as Twilight, or stock alternatives built in some Android manufacturers' ROMs have provided similar facilities for a while, although we suspect Apple's solution will integrate deeper with the operating system.

In fact, that's of actual concern to the developers of a popular application that deals with the same problem. It's called f.lux and it launched way back in 2009. According to f.lux developer and co-founder Michael Herf, the app was the first to employ automatic display tuning with the goal of reducing light from the blue spectrum, which might give you a perspective on how long such algorithms have been in development. In addition to desktop platforms, f.lux was present on iOS as well, until Apple took it down from the App Store for using private application programming interfaces.