Today we call on Apple to allow us to release f.lux on iOS, to open up access to the features announced this week, and to support our goal of furthering research in sleep and chronobiology.

The makers of the dimming Flux application want access to private APIs to release in the App Store. In my opinion, they shouldn’t be granted it. Not because they haven’t got a good app, but because these screen whiteness APIs should either be released to everyone or not at all. If they’re released to everyone, we will see as many screen dimming apps as there are farting apps.

Furthermore, the stunt that Flux pulled to distribute their app via GitHub without actually open-sourcing the codebase, by adding an executable binary blob to an empty Xcode project and having user’s side load that, was a terrible move. It made the project look open-source, but was actually executing arbitrary code which no one but Flux knows what does. A bad precedent, and Apple were paying attention, and that is why they’ve drew Apple’s ire and swift sherlocking.

I find Flux’s response poised and classy, but they shouldn’t be allowed to access the private APIs on iOS. They will continue to have tremendous success as a Mac app, and I will continue to use their app. I hope they get their patent approved and Apple license the technology from them. If I were them, however, I would release the code, for iOS and for the Mac, as free and open source. If they’re mission is really “to enable f.lux to advance the science, while providing customized solutions for each person”, then they should go open source. If they had done that in the first place, I bet Apple wouldn’t have minded that they were using private APIs.

And Apple’s ire extends beyond Flux, in the release notes of the Xcode 7.3 beta, it says that they’ve removed all private frameworks from the SDK.