SonoLune makes your phone feel calmer to live with.

New in version 2.3.0

The Presence Field drains an app of its colour, and until now that

• The quiet has a sound now, and its own place to live. The Presence room gains a section for it, kept apart from the three ways of making a screen duller — because these are heard rather than drawn, they are the only part of the field that reaches you with the phone face down, and they cost something the visual ones do not. Both are off unless you choose them, per app or for all of them
• The talking blurs lays soft rain under a covered app, so speech stops carrying. The volume eases down brings the app itself to a little under half while the quiet is on it, and lets it back up when you leave. Two switches rather than one, because the choice is yours — though each is weaker alone and the room says so: a volume that drops by itself reads as a fault and gets turned back up, and a bed with nothing brought down under it can only ever make a room louder. With both on the rain holds exactly where it is while the app falls, so the total goes down and what falls furthest is the thing you were trying to leave
• It never fights you for the volume. Touch the volume keys at any point and it lets go on the spot, keeps its hands off for the rest of the session, and hands back the level you chose. A control may be stopped from making things worse; it may never be stopped from being undone
• The sound leaves with the screen, not with the clock. Switching to another app used to leave rain playing over it for as long as twelve seconds, and the volume held down with it. The field holds its own clock through a short grace on purpose — a two-second glance at a message must not hand back a fresh free-use window — but what is HEARD was waiting on that clock too, which is how a quiet meant to stay behind in one app ended up following you into the next. The light has always lifted the moment a chosen app is no longer in front. The sound does now as well, and comes back gently rather than abruptly if you step straight back in
• The field works in YouTube again. It had been excluded outright, along with a handful of other Google apps, for a reason that is real and has no clean answer: the account switcher draws INSIDE whichever app called it, so the phone reports YouTube rather than the account screen, and there is no signal that says one is open. Excluding the whole app was the safe reading. It was also the app most people most wanted the quiet over, and the cost was total — no field, no levers, no sound, ever. That trade is now made the other way for this one app
• The three ways of making a screen duller now work without the per-app field. They were written as shapes on the dwell ramp, so they belonged to chosen apps and nothing else — which meant every refinement since the per-app field arrived went to the people who had granted Usage Access, and the whole-screen quiet kept exactly what it shipped with. The edges, the words and the bright hooks now ride the depth you set instead of the one a clock produced. The two sound switches stay where they are, deliberately: they begin and end by entering and leaving an app, and a whole-screen version would simply play from the moment you switched it on
• And an app can be told not to fade, or not to be released. Both have been real settings inside every app tuning since per-app arrived, and both were read every time the quiet was decided — but nothing anywhere could set them. They came from the universal switches, or from an attention pack. A pack that had ever written one off would have left an app that silently never quieted, with nothing on any screen to show why or put it back
• And the guide finally mentions the rest of the room. It described the field, the delay and the apps you chose, and stopped there — so the five ways of making an app duller were discoverable only by scrolling the settings and reading switch labels. It names them now, and names the ones YOU have on, because a guide that lists features you have not chosen is a brochure rather than an explanation
• It stays out of the way when you already have sound. A soundscape is already a bed, and laying a second one underneath is the one way this could make a room louder instead of quieter. With anything of your own playing, or with Night holding the audio, the lever simply does not arrive
• Rain, and not the brown noise everyone asks for — including us. Speech carries between 500 Hz and 4 kHz, and the consonants that make words legible sit at the top of that. Brown noise has almost nothing left up there. It is the loveliest thing to sit inside and the worst at this particular job
• A Visiting Hours arc brings it along with everything else. A visit is the one moment consent is unambiguous — chosen, for these apps, for this long, before the pull started — so it arrives at full strength. It is still borrowed, and still handed back at the end
• It cannot mute an app, and would not if it could. Android gives no app control over another app's volume; only the phone itself can do that. And a hard mute would be the first thing in SonoLune that seals something shut, which is not what any of this is for
• Keep drifting now keeps you where you were. The breath at the threshold can only be offered by bringing SonoLune to the front, so asking the question already interrupted the drift — and two of its three answers mean "I am staying here", yet both left you sitting in SonoLune looking at the one screen the moment was not about. They hand the screen back now. Only stepping out has a destination, and only stepping out goes there
• A visit no longer switches the quiet off everywhere else. Arming one used to set the chosen apps aside entirely, so agreeing to twenty minutes of a single feed left every other app you had chosen with no field at all until it ended — the opposite of what agreeing to it meant. The visit adds its app to yours now. Its app runs at the arc's full strength; yours keep the field on your own settings, and nothing of yours pauses
• And a visit survives being closed. It lived only in memory, so swiping SonoLune away from Recents ended the arc in silence: the next launch handed your own apps back and the stretch you had agreed to simply stopped, with nothing to say why. A running visit is written down now, and picked back up where it was — settling at the moment it was always going to, not on a fresh clock
• The volume comes back even if SonoLune dies holding it. The level you had is written down before anything moves, so a crash mid-quiet is corrected on the next start rather than leaving you at half volume with nothing to blame
• The notice that tells you a new SonoLune is ready has never once been able to open. Not since it was written. It was being built onto a part of the app that cannot show anything, so it threw the moment it was asked to appear and the error went nowhere — and two earlier rounds of work on WHAT it announces were measured against a notice that could not arrive. This is the first release able to tell you about the next one
• And it waits for your first minute to be your own. The moment onboarding ends is the arrival — rain starting, the light coming up, the room opening — and the app already keeps its own guide out of that minute. A notice about a newer version has less claim than the guide does, so on a first run it holds and asks the next time you open the app instead
• A field with an arriving pack in it comes back in the morning. Packs survived a cold start only when they were the ONLY thing playing; chosen alongside rain or a micro texture they were gone, and the reason was that the app was saving a field it had emptied a moment earlier. A pack now lives in the same place as the six elements, so everything that carries a field carries it too
• A pack can go into a Focus session. It could not before — not partly, at all: "Use Current Field" carried the elements and silently dropped every pack, and a pack that was playing stopped the moment a session began. The whole field goes in now, and comes back out
• Setting a pack down, or moving it nearer, counts as changing the field. Touching any element already released the saved soundscape you started from; a pack was the one change that did not, so the name stayed lit over a room that had visibly moved — and saving from there offered to overwrite a soundscape you were no longer listening to
• The light stops moving when the sound stops. With the light following your atmosphere, pausing left it breathing over silence — the one state it cannot be in sync with. It lets go now, and comes back the moment sound does, without your switch being touched
• Reading Light and the Focus greyscale no longer cancel each other out. One draws a warm paper page and the other drains the colour off the screen, so whichever was tapped last quietly undid the other. Greyscale is now held back while a paper light is carried, and says why — and choosing a paper light sets greyscale down rather than locking it
• Warm Light and Blue Light Reduction were measured, and the screen now says which is which. At their maximums warmth removes 43% of the blue and this removes 35% — so warmth is the STRONGER blue filter, and the honest reason for a second control is not more reduction but less colour. Whites stay near white, for reading anything whose colour has to be right
• Screen Dim is the only control in Light that is not a filter. Everything else lays light on top of your screen; Dim lowers the light the screen actually gives off. It always did, and the wording made it sound like one more wash among washes
• Quiet Veil and Paper Matte say what the hour is doing to them. Both are quietly stronger after dark than at noon — Quiet Veil about twice, Paper Matte three and a half times — so one slider position did visibly different things at different times and looked inconsistent. They now name where they are. It is about the room and not about your body clock: a screen far brighter than a dark room is where glare actually hurts
• The guard that keeps text readable under all this now counts every wash. Blue Light Reduction was not in it, though it flattens contrast as hard as warmth does, so warm and blue together — the pair most likely to be used together — was the one combination with nothing watching it. The remaining weights were measured rather than guessed, which also means Quiet Veil stops throttling the sliders it was never damaging
• Ultra is finally deeper than Dark. Measured, the step between them moved the screen from 40% to 37% — while the intensity slider sitting under those chips moves nearly six times as far. Ultra now reaches 25%, and reaches it on any phone: it used to mean two different nights depending on the panel
• The night actually deepens as the night goes on. That is the one thing making Night a curve rather than another dark preset, and it was moving the screen about half a percent an hour — the smallest movement anywhere in the app, beaten by every control beside it. A whole night now travels about as far as one preset step, and the switch says where in the night you are while it happens
• Tapping a night preset puts the WHOLE night back to it, Moon Haze and the intensity slider included. It used to set three things and leave the rest where they lay, so the same chip gave a different night depending on what happened to be on when you tapped it
• Long-pressing a night preset to hear it out no longer keeps it. The preview wrote the night and never gave it back, so releasing your finger left the light where the preview put it — permanently, with no chip lit to say so. It borrows the night now and hands it back exactly
• And there is a floor under the night. Ultra, the slider at its maximum and the deepest hour used to compose to a screen at 5%, and 2% on an AMOLED. A night you cannot undo because you cannot find the control that undoes it is the one thing this must never be, so nothing stacks past 12%
• The night sky card stops offering a tap that cannot work. On some launchers, asking to place a widget is accepted and then quietly dropped — and Android reports that as success, so the card said "Tap to place it", the tap said it had worked, and no widget appeared and nothing explained why. The card now asks first whether this phone can be asked at all, and where it cannot it gives the long-press route in its own words instead of as an apology afterwards
• And the release archive gets its own pictures back. Each section here carries a small icon, and when these notes are read from the website by an older copy of the app, two thirds of them were arriving as a blank circle — the list that turns a name back into a picture had been kept by hand and had fallen 70 behind. It is built from the notes themselves now, so it cannot fall behind again. Nobody had seen it, because until this release the notice that sends you here could not open
• A saved soundscape comes back with its name still lit. The field itself always restored correctly, and the name above it did not — which is what made it puzzling rather than obviously broken. The app decides whether to keep that name by asking whether the restored field is still that soundscape, and it was rebuilding one side of that question without the arriving packs in it. Two things that were the same were being compared and found different
• And turning the light-follows-sound switch off works after a restart. It stopped the light perfectly well until the app was closed and reopened, and then it only cleared the switch and left the light turning — because the note saying "this field was opened for the sound, so it is ours to put away" was kept in memory while the field itself was kept on disk. A restart woke to a field it had opened and no memory of opening it, so it left it alone out of politeness
• A visit now always hands the field back. It was returned in one place, and that place could be reached with the field already down — which happened whenever an arc outlived the screen it opened over. Nothing else in the app ever took the loan back, so it simply stayed: apps you chose afterwards were quietly written into a stale list and were gone by morning, the next arc put that stale list back over your real one, and the per-app sheet started offering the arc's own settings as though they were the app's. One arc, three separate ways of looking wrong, and one line between them
• So the app you had chosen is no longer replaced by the app of the hour that just fired. That was the most visible face of it, and the one that looked most like a decision somebody had made
• And an app can no longer end up carrying a timing nobody chose. The per-app sheet writes the whole tuning the moment anything in it is touched, so while the field was still wearing an arc's settings, one tap in there saved them for good. It reads the settings underneath the arc now, and says plainly that everything below is what the app goes back to afterwards — never what the visit is doing this minute
• A visit hands back the rain and the volume too. It brings the whole suite along by design, and those two were the ones it could turn on and not give back — so a quiet you agreed to for twenty minutes kept a bed running over every app until the next time you closed the app entirely
• The soft chime at the release stopped killing the rain it was played over. The chime tidies the sound engine away when it finishes, and that tidying released the field's own bed — about seven seconds after the release beat, with the field still holding the screen and the cue still waiting to be tapped. It sounded exactly like the rain giving up on its own
• And now that the two can be heard together, they have been made to sit properly. The bed steps back while the chime sounds and eases home as it resolves, because rain is broadband exactly where a warm tone gets its shape. The chime is also brought back up by however far the volume was eased down — both ride the same stream, the bed already cancelled that and the chime did not, so a visit was the one place the chime was quietest
• The one card that shows you the way out can no longer be discarded, or drawn over. The eye-break cue holds the screen for its own length and everything else defers to it — including the Presence release cue, which by then is the only thing on a screen the quiet has made hard to use, and whose next chance to appear is four minutes later. A tappable way out now outranks that hold. And the Presence breath pause has stopped claiming the hold in the first place: it borrows the eye break's look, which was enough to be mistaken for one
• A second cue can no longer stack on top of a first. Every source draws through one place and shares one queue, but not one WINDOW — the eye-break alarm builds its own, so it appeared over whatever was already there instead of replacing it. Worst against the release card, which stays for ten minutes while an app is held unreadable
• The per-app sheet now has the same shape as the page it belongs to. Fade to quiet and Release are parents on the settings page, with everything they govern indented beneath them and dimmed when they are off; in the sheet all fourteen controls sat flat, in a different order, with both parents in among their own children. Turning Fade to quiet off left six switches looking live while the quiet ignored every one of them
• The three ways of making a screen duller are no longer drawn as though they were switched off. They reach the whole screen now, and needed nothing to do it — but they sat inside a group that greys out until you have named some apps, under a line saying everything there acts on the apps you choose. They were live, they worked, and they looked broken
• Giving one app a longer window before the quiet begins now asks the same question the shared setting does. Instant is free on both, as it always has been; the window of ordinary use first is a supporter unlock on the page and was simply not asked for in the sheet. Nothing already saved changes
• The Temperature dial comes back where you left it. It is not stored — it is worked back out from the two sliders it drives — and that working-out did not match the driving. Set to a quarter it returned as four tenths, set to half it returned as seven tenths; only the two ends survived. So the light was right and the control above it was somewhere else, and nudging it from there moved far more than the distance suggested
• And Temperature now says what it is. It described itself as balancing cool against warm, which reads as a dial with two ends. It has one: at rest it applies nothing at all and leaves the screen its own colour, and from there it raises warmth and blue reduction together. Nothing in the suite can make a screen cooler than the panel already is. It now carries a live readout, like Warm Light
• The Living Field stops moving when there is nothing to move with. With the light following your sound, every fresh start left it breathing over silence: it only ever let go after it had seen something play, and a launch has seen nothing. A field found already following, with the switch still on, is now understood as one that was following something before
• Your saved soundscapes cannot be erased by a launch that has not finished reading them. Everything else the Sound suite remembers is a preference it can rebuild; a soundscape is a room you shaped by hand and named, and there is no second copy of it anywhere. It was being written back out by anything that saved during startup — pausing audio is enough — using the empty list the app starts with. It now refuses to write them until it has genuinely read them, and one unreadable room no longer takes the others with it
• Do Not Disturb survives the app being killed mid-session. SonoLune hands the notification filter back if it finds it was holding one when it last stopped, which is right — nobody should be left silenced by something that is no longer running. But that check cannot tell a crash from a session still going, because it happens before the session has been read back. So a Focus session reopened after a swipe came back with the switch on, the clock counting, and every notification arriving. The silence is taken back now, and only ever silently: where the permission has since been withdrawn it simply declines, and the switch says so itself