Has Apple Ripped Off A Jailbreak App To Make iOS 9.3's Night Shift?

Picture this. You create a highly popular app that allows jailbroken iOS users to alter the lighting on their devices to potentially reduce the impact of blue light on their quality of sleep. Your app is then essentially copied by Apple, introduced as a native feature in iOS, and your requests to include the fairly basic, non-intrusive app in the official App Store are blocked by Apple itself.

Seem unfair? Well, that's pretty much what's happened to F.lux - a very highly-regarded app that's now only available on jailbroken devices. It was previously possible to install it using a method called side-loading without jailbreaking your device, but Apple contacted F.lux in November last year to ask it to cease and desist - quite possibly because Night Shift, a new blue light-limiting feature of the forthcoming iOS 9.3, does exactly the same thing.

F.lux's makers claim that by warming the light emitted by your Apple device - lowering the amount of blue spectrum light it dishes out - you can greatly reduce its impact on sleep quality. A number of recent studies have linked viewing of blue spectrum light late at night with poor sleep quality as well as making it harder to fall asleep too.

Comparing the two side by side, Apple's implementation bears remarkable similarities, allowing users to set specific Kelvin-scale lighting levels to be applied at different times of the day and taps into location services to alter the lighting based on local sunset times. The features and outcome are the same, such as the ability to alter the levels of the daytime and nighttime color temperatures.

The only main difference is that the F.lux team released their app back in 2012. Now Apple comes in four years later, is trying to block F.lux entirely and for the most part is treating Night Shift like it's own idea. It recently responded to Apple's announcement of Night Shift:

We’re proud that we are the original innovators and leaders in this area. In our continued work over the last seven years, we have learned how complicated people actually are. The next phase of f.lux is something we cannot wait to ship to the world.

Today we call on Apple to allow us to release f.lux on iOS, to open up access to the features announced this week, and to support our goal of furthering research in sleep and chronobiology.

Now, we can speculate as to whether Apple would have introduced Night Shift on its own - after all, it has been a while since F.lux was released and only now with the launch of iOS 9.3 on the horizon have we seen Night Shift.

Indeed, there has been pressure on technology companies to protect users' health for a while. In fact, just today the BBC published an article regarding Prof Paul Gringra - professor of children's sleep medicine and neurodisability, who has been campaigning for companies such as Apple to do more. Speaking to the BBC he said:

I think industry has been very worried about affecting sales and the use of their devices.

This will have a small impact, but on a unbelievably huge number of people, by baking it into the devices it will become part of the way they are used.

It's an incredibly welcome move, it's fantastic, although it's late it is to be applauded and it will become a natural way for people to use tablets

Clearly, then, it could only have been a matter of time before Apple introduced a F.lux-like feature anyway. Sadly, it seems highly unlikely, even given the F.lux team's surprisingly calm plea recently for Apple to allow the app to find it's way into the App Store, that F.lux will be an option for anyone other than jailbreakers. Apple has stamped its authority on the subject with Night Shift without so much as a public nod to the team for the fact it came up with the idea and implemented it, interface and all, in a near-identical way four years ago.

Another nail in the coffin is that the APIs (application programming interfaces) that are needed to access the controls to tweak the amount of blue spectrum light emitted by a screen aren't accessible to official app developers either - the customization here is clearly considered by Apple to be too extensive - something that it's keen to keep firmly under control and is the main reason that so many people still jailbreak their iOS devices.

Many other features such as Control Center, have been pinched by Apple from the jailbreaking community over the years and in many ways it's a shame there's not more collaboration between the two parties to come up with new features. As it stands, Apple seems to simply pluck ideas it sees are popular and integrates them into iOS with the vast majority of users thinking Apple created them.

Many other features such as Control Center, have been pinched by Apple from the jailbreaking community over the years and in many ways it's a shame there's not more collaboration between the two parties to come up with new features. As it stands, Apple seems to simply pluck ideas it sees are popular and integrates them into iOS with the vast majority of users thinking Apple created them.

Do you think Apple should acknowledge F.lux? Do you think that now there's a similar feature in iOS 9.3 that F.lux should be offered in the official App Store? Let me know what you think in the comments, on Twitter or Facebook.