Auto Brightness Clock
A clock that dims itself.
Turns an old iPhone into a bedside clock that reads the light in the room and fades to a warm, dim amber as the room goes dark. Built during newborn night feeds, when every bright screen is the enemy.
- Platform
- iOS
- Requires
- iOS 17
- Devices
- iPhone
- Pricing
- Free. No subscription, no in-app purchases, no advertising.
On TestFlight. App Store submission pending a support page.
What it does
-
01
It reads the room
The front camera measures ambient light and the display follows it — bright enough to read across the room at noon, dim enough at 3am that it does not wake anyone.
-
02
Warm at night
As the room darkens the digits shift from warm beige to a deep amber. Low blue, low glare, easy on eyes that have just opened.
-
03
Big digits, true black
Edge-to-edge numerals on pure black. On an OLED iPhone the unlit pixels draw nothing, so an old handset can sit on the nightstand for years.
-
04
Three faces
Swipe up or down for minimal, weather, or day and date. It remembers the one you keep coming back to.
-
05
Stays awake, stays quiet
The screen never sleeps while the clock is up. No account, no ads, no notifications, nothing to configure.
Privacy, in full
The camera measures brightness and nothing else. No images are recorded, stored or transmitted — ever.
Everything that leaves your device
| What | Who receives it | Where | Why | Trigger |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your approximate location, reduced to roughly city level | Apple WeatherKit | Apple infrastructure | Showing the current temperature and forecast on the weather face | You choose |
- Deny the camera permission and the clock still works — it simply stops adapting and you set the brightness yourself.
- Deny location and every face except the weather face works normally.
- The app has no backend of its own. Apart from Apple's weather service it makes no network requests at all.
Where your content lives
Your chosen clock face is stored on the device. That is the only thing the app remembers, and there is nothing else to store.
Analytics
None. No usage statistics, crash reports or telemetry are collected.
Permissions it asks for
- Camera
- Measuring how bright the room is. Each frame is reduced to a single brightness number and discarded immediately. No image is ever saved, shown or sent.
- Location (approximate)
- Fetching local weather. Requested at reduced accuracy, so Apple receives roughly your city, not your address.