Automating Night Vision Red Mode for iPhone

🏮🏮 A Gentler Glow.

Ever since Apple released the Watch Ultra, its Night Mode has been a distinguishing feature. When this watch face setting is on Auto, it follows the local sunset and sunrise, switching the display into a monochromatic, pure red display.

Human low-light vision is only sensitive to shorter blue-green wavelengths, and so longer red wavelengths augment scotopic vision instead of overpowering it.

👁️ Eyes don't have to adjust to a bright display in the dark.

I bought an Apple Watch Ultra for the extended battery life, but the way night mode makes the watch sleepytime-friendly has become my favorite feature. Not only does the red light display make the watch more useful at night, it also gives the mind a visual reminder to disengage from the device. When monochromatic red, the watch becomes a utilitarian tool, no longer a vivid fascinating distraction. The affects of night mode are so profound for me, that now I want all my digital devices' displays to support night mode.

Apparently Apple hasn't made this a first-class feature, yet. We can put a few pieces together to make a do-it-yourself iOS night mode: Accessibility Color Filters, Shortcuts, a Control Center toggle, and Focus automation.

📱 This guide was created on iOS 26.1

iOS Accessibility / Color Filters

To create the visual night mode effect, we use one of iOS' built-in Accessibility features. Navigate to:

• Settings
• Accessibility
• Display & Text
• Color Filters

Here we enable Color Filters, setting it to Color Tint, with maximum Intensity and lowest Hue (red, 0º):

Enabling and disabling this Color Tint is a manual process, and there are a few more tweaks which improve its appearance and readability. Not something we want to navigate in Settings everytime we need it.

Leave the Color Filter's Intensity and Hue settings in place, and now let's automate control of the effect.

Shortcuts

Instead of setting this manually, we'll use Shortcuts to hook into Sleep Focus and Control Center. The Shortcuts I created are shared with iCloud. Add each of these to your Shortcuts library:

• Enable Night Mode
• Disable Night Mode
• Night Mode (toggle)

⚠️ Shared Shortcuts do not include the custom icons. You can set the icons in the Shortcuts app.

Control Center Button

Add a button to easily enable and disable night mode. In iOS Control Center, swiping down from upper right corner of screen, tap:

1. + in upper left corner
2. Add a Control
3. Shortcuts
4. Run a Shortcut
5. Choose: Night Mode

The result should be a Night Mode control that you can tap to switch between night mode and regular display:

⚠️ This Night Mode button does not indicate its enabled/disabled state. This seems to be a limitation of how Shortcuts work in Control Center.

Sleep Focus Automation

Within the Shortcuts app, tap:

1. Automations tab
2. + in upper right corner
3. Sleep
4. When Bedtime Begins
5. Run Immediately
6. Do: Enable Night Mode

And then again for the complementary action:

1. Automations tab
2. + in upper right corner
3. Sleep
4. When Waking Up
5. Run Immediately
6. Do: Disable Night Mode

The result should be night mode automations in Shortcuts, that run automatically along with Sleep focus and its schedule:

Results

Ideally, now you'll experience pure monochromatic night mode bliss whenever the Sleep focus kicks in, and you can also quickly toggle night mode using the Control Center button.

🔺🌌 Subdue Your Phone.

Discuss this post in the fediverse. Published 2025-12-27.