[nikvdp]

iOS actually has a hard to find setting that lets you make the screen super dim. It's been a lifesaver when using my phone in the evening. To enable it go to Settings -> Accessibility -> Zoom and then tap the Zoom toggle switch.

Once that's enabled iOS will now bring up a super secret popup menu whenever you double tap the screen with three fingers. From the little popup menu go to Choose Filter -> Low Light and your screen will go dimmer than is normally possible. With this on and the normal brightness mode set to its lowest setting the screen can get quite dim indeed.

[void-pointer]

There’s two settings you can use in tandem to get an OLED iPhone brightness even lower than that.

First is the zoom trick you’ve already described, then you can use the “reduce white point” display accessibility setting to apply even more darkening.

With minimum display brightness, low-light zoom mode and white point reduction set to 100%, the display gets very very dim. If you do this in normal lighting conditions, the display is basically impossible to see.

[tzs]

> Once that's enabled iOS will now bring up a super secret popup menu whenever you double tap the screen with three fingers.

On current iOS you don't need to be in zoom and double tap. The zoom filter is also available by tapping the "Zoom Filter" setting which is 6 items below the Zoom setting in Settings -> Accessibility -> Zoom. The double tap in zoom thing is there to make it easy to quickly change the filter while zoomed.

This and the white point setting void-pointer suggested are both controllable from Shortcuts.

There is a Zoom action that supports turning zoom on, off, or toggling it, a White Point action that supports turning it on or off, and a Brightness action that supports setting the brightness to a given percentage or asking for the brightness.

I just tried making two Shortcuts, "Low Light" and "Normal Light".

Low Light:

  Turn Zoom On
  Turn White Point On
  Set Brightness to 0%

"Hey Siri, Low Light" then works. It does leave you zoomed, so you need to cancel that, but then you are left at 0% brightness and whatever Zoom filter you have set is in effect. "Turn White Point On" will set the white point reduction to whatever percentage you have it set to in the Reduce White Point system settings.

Normal Light:

  Turn Zoom Off
  Turn White Point Off
  Set Brightness to <ask each time>

That does what you'd expect. Siri asks you what brightness you want from 0 to 1. You can change that to a specific percentage if you don't want to be prompted.

PS: This only fully works on iOS. On iPadOS zoom filters only work while actually zooming, and then only apply to what is shown in the zoom rectangle. On iOS the zoom filter applies when zoom is enabled regardless of whether or not you are actually zoomed.

The white point reduction does work on iPadOS so you do get some lowering of minimum brightness but not as much as on iOS when you can use both.

[arielweisberg]

THANK YOU! I have wanted this since forever. I can't believe this is locked away so deeply and inconveniently.

[jug]

Yes, I use this trick. You can adjust the filter to your heart's content. But I agree with the parent here that it should go dimmer as-is and we shouldn't need this. I'm not sure how light perception works, if it's a logarithmic thing like noise, but if not, this scale should probably be logarithmic instead. Or even moreso if it already is. Because I think we generally don't care exactly how bright it is if it's bright daylight and we need to max it, but conversely care much more for reaching the dimmest levels if we're in bed (or if we don't care, we probably should according to the article).

[nikitoci]

You can also set Settings -> Accessibility -> Accessibility shortcut (at the bottom) -> Enable “Reduce white point”

Now you can triple-click lock button to make screen dimmer. I have been using this for ages, saves your eyes in the dark.

[edeion]

For what it's worth, as far as I understand, you actually need to activate the Zoom Controller to get the menu mentioned above.

[jodacola]

I just tried this out. Turned on zoom, without the controller, couldn’t get the menu when three-finger double-tapping.

However, when I three-finger triple-tapped, the menu showed up.

[spirit557]

Do you know does this actually lower the backlight or is it changing gamma or something like that. I'll try it anyways thanks

[londons_explore]

iphones are all OLED now, so there is no distinction.

On an old LCD display there are some filters that do a linear/nonlinear mapping from 0->255 brightness to 0->64 for example, leaving the actual backlight at the same brightness. The downside is that colour banding and quantization start to get really bad - and 'black' starts to look very non-black.

[spirit557]

My older iphone is not oled so that would explain why I did not like this setting when I tried it some time ago like what you say about blacks looking out of balance. Thanks

[thinkmassive]

The latest iPhone SE still has an LCD screen. It was released in 2022 and is still a current model.