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It’s terribly tempting to use your phone late at night before bed, but doing so can wreak havoc on your sleep schedule and quality. That’s why Google’s Digital Wellbeing app has a dedicated bedtime mode that you can toggle. Sleep mode silences your phone and changes various options on the screen to encourage you to stop using your phone. Currently, only the basic, pre-installed Digital Wellbeing app has the ability to automatically change the distracting options on the screen, meaning you’re limited to using the app’s time-based trigger. But in the upcoming Android 15 update, Google is giving third-party apps the ability to change the distraction options on the screen, opening the door for developers to let users create an even more personalized sleep routine.

If you open the Digital Wellbeing settings page and tap Lying mode, you can change when the routine is triggered. You can set it to a fixed schedule or turn it on when it charges after a certain time of day. After choosing when to activate it, you can customize what happens when sleep mode is activated. You can choose Sleep mode to activate Android’s Do Not Disturb mode, ensuring that only alarms and calls from important contacts reach you. You can also choose Sleep Mode to change various screen options, such as toggling the screen grayscale, enabling dark mode, turning off always-on display, and dimming the wallpaper.

If you choose to allow sleep mode to activate Do Not Disturb mode on Android, then the system creates a corresponding Do Not Disturb schedule called “sleep mode”. This can be seen under Settings > Notifications > Do Not Disturb > Schedules. Android has long allowed third-party apps to create their own Do Not Disturb schedules via AutomaticZenRule APIs, as long as they have the aptly named “Non-Disruptive Access” permission (known internally as ACCESS_NOTIFICATION_POLICY) sub Settings > Apps > Special app access.

However, the operating system does not allow third-party apps to change the various screen options that Google’s Digital Wellbeing app toggles during sleep mode. This is because the APIs used by Digital Wellbeing to toggle grayscale, disable AOD, dim the wallpaper and enable dark mode are generally not available to third-party apps. Several developers have already come up with ways to change these screen options in their apps, but their methods require setting up and using ADB to manually grant some hidden permissions. Fortunately, app developers won’t have to use these workarounds in Android 15, as the operating system finally provides a public API for third-party apps to control the same screen options controlled by Google’s Digital Wellbeing app.

With the release of Android 15 Developer Preview 2, Google introduced a new ZenDeviceEffects An API that allows apps to dim the wallpaper, minimize display color saturation (i.e. go to grayscale), suppress the surrounding display, and toggle night mode (i.e. dark theme) when the created from the app, the Do Not Disturb schedule went into effect. The developer of Tasker, one of the best automation apps for Android, has added support for these APIs in its app, allowing it to set a custom Do Not Disturb schedule that also changes these options on the screen.

The benefit of Google making this API public is that users won’t be limited to using the company’s Digital Wellbeing app to manage these nighttime screen options. Users could, for example, create an even more personalized bedtime routine via a third-party app, potentially triggered based on an NFC tag scan instead of time, for example. There are potentially other uses for this API that application developers should discover and take advantage of.

As Google has publicly announced ZenDeviceEffects API in the Developer Preview 2 blog post, there is a small chance that it will be deprecated before the stable version of Android 15 later this year. However, there is a decent chance that it will change the API before the stable release, as various features like changing dark mode currently do not work despite what the documentation says. In addition, we hope that the company will open the additional ones ZenDeviceEffects that Android 15 supports, including the ability to disable adaptive brightness, disable touch to wake, disable tilt to wake, disable touch interactions, minimize radio usage, and maximize snooze mode. However, these additional effects are currently hidden from the public Android 15 SDK, so there’s a chance they’ll never be released.