Michael and Lorna Herf, the developers behind popular nighttime useage app f.lux, have released a statement in response to Apple’s announcement of Night Shift mode in iOS 9.3.
The f.lux app adjusts a display's color depending on location and time. It makes nighttime screen gazing easier on the eyes and is strikingly similar to the new Night Shift feature.
“Apple announced this week that they’ve joined our fight to use technology to improve sleep … Apple’s involvement in fixing this problem is a big commitment and an important first step,” the Herfs said in a blog post. “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.”
Apple recently admonished the married couple after they released a compiled binary of f.lux for iOS and then encouraged users to sideload the app onto their iOS device to sidestep Apple’s restrictions on private API calls. Apple considered this a violation of Apple Store policy and rejected the app.
“We have been as polite as we can to Apple in hopes that they will open up the platform to developers like us. The demand for f.lux is certainly incredible,” Michael said in a post on Hacker News regarding Apple shutting down f.lux for iOS. “It’s really really clear that Apple has added lots of great features to iOS (and the new devices) to adjust screen colors. The new models even have RGB color sensing, so they are an ideal platform to build f.lux on. (I was pretty excited about our next version!)”
According to what Michael said to re/code, Apple representative Richard Chipman contacted the Herfs and told them that, “We were not authorized to use the iOS SDK [standard developer kit] or Xcode [Apple’s developer tools] for the purpose we did, and we could not distribute f.lux as we did.”
Michael and Lorna Herf both worked for Google after the search giant acquired their startup Picasa, a photo storage service. As final send-off in their response to Apple’s announcement, the Herfs once again asked 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.”
