Invert Your Phone’s Colours For Nighttime Navigation

Most standalone GPS units have a night mode that draws the map with dark colours so the glare doesn’t distract you while driving, but many smartphone GPS apps lack this critical feature. However, you can give any GPS app a reasonable stand-in for a real night mode by inverting your phone’s screen.

We’ve previously suggested inverting your screen for easier reading at night, but it occurred to me while driving recently that the same trick works well for nighttime navigation.

On an iPhone, go to Settings > General > Accessibility, then set your Triple-Click option to invert colours (not while you’re driving, please). Then, you can triple click your home button at any time to invert the screen. Hopefully Google and Apple will update their iOS mapping apps with real night modes, but until then, this is a decent hack to keep the glare out of your eyes.

Google was kind enough to include a night mode in Google Maps for Android, but if you’re using a third- party app, inverting your screen isn’t quite so simple. Stock Android doesn’t offer a system-wide inverted mode, but a lot of custom ROMs do. No matter your platform though, having a bright white screen in the corner of your vision isn’t safe when you’re driving at night, so anything you can do to dim it is worth the effort.


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

Here are the cheapest plans available for Australia’s most popular NBN speed tier.

At Lifehacker, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.

Comments


One response to “Invert Your Phone’s Colours For Nighttime Navigation”

Leave a Reply