Gloaming

Gloaming makes your phone boring — for exactly as long as you want it to be.

Quiet your phone for whatever stretch of time you want — set up Do Not Disturb and the screen effects in one place. It all works even with the app closed, because it uses the Alarms and reminders permission you grant in the app. That guarantees it fires at exactly the time you set, and it never goes through the background job scheduler.

WHY THIS ONE

Android already has a bedtime mode. On a lot of phones it does not fire until you open the app that runs it — or it fires, but late. That mode is scheduled as a background job, and every vendor's battery management gets a say in whether background jobs ever run. When something in that chain defers it there is no error and no notification — Do Not Disturb simply never comes on and the effects never apply.

Gloaming does not use a background job. It asks for the Alarms and reminders permission — the one you grant inside the app — which the system guarantees will fire at the minute you set. The app holds its own Do Not Disturb rule and switches it itself, so bedtime happens whether or not the app is open.

WHAT YOU GET

• A 24-hour dial. One window, set by dragging either end around the dial or by tapping a time and picking it exactly. You choose the mornings you want to wake up on, not the evenings you go to bed: pick Saturday and the window runs from Friday evening to Saturday morning.

• End bedtime at your alarm. Turn it on and the window follows whatever time your alarm is set for, instead of you keeping two schedules in step.

• A Quick Settings tile with three states rather than two. Three faces, one meaning each. Hourglass — bedtime is on and waiting for its hour. Tick — a window is running right now. Gloaming’s own mark — bedtime is off. The tile never shows a tick for something that has not started.

• An allowlist for the window — who can call, who can message, conversations, repeat callers, reminders, calendar events, media. The screen reports the system's current state, not the one the app switched on and assumes is in effect.

• Screen effects: grayscale, wallpaper dimming, dark theme, always-on display. Where the operating system does not let an app control an effect, the switch is not drawn at all, rather than offering one that lies. On Samsung phones, grayscale, the dark theme and wallpaper dimming run through your own Modes and Routines: Gloaming hands Samsung’s app each routine ready-made, you tap Save once, and from then on they are ordinary switches.

• It checks rather than assumes. Some phones freeze apps in the background, and the failure that causes is specific: the end of a window never fires, so bedtime does not end — whatever it switched on stays on into your day. Gloaming watches every end and says when one is late, with a button to the background setting that is usually the cause. It also asks once, eleven minutes after install, whether this phone delivers background alarms at all — silent unless the answer is no.

• A boot watch, for phones that never tell apps the phone restarted: bedtime stays switched on while nothing behind it will fire. Gloaming notices.

• English, Russian and Ukrainian, and clock times in whichever 12- or 24-hour format your phone is set to.

PRIVACY

Gloaming has no internet permission. Not "does not send data" — it cannot. There is no analytics, no advertising, no account and no third-party code. Your schedule and the app's own log stay on the phone, and uninstalling removes them.

REQUIREMENTS

Android 15 or newer. Two permissions, both granted from inside the app: notification policy access (for Do Not Disturb) and Alarms and reminders.

OPEN SOURCE

Apache License 2.0. The whole app is public at github.com/jemcik/Gloaming