This is not an announcement of changes to come, just confirming how things have been for several years already.

Working on Red Moon is not a priority for me right now, but I still use it daily. I plan to maintain it to the level of "works on my device[1]." That means I will fix bugs that annoy me enough, and that's all — no other bugfixes or new features are planned. That said, I'd be thrilled to have co-maintainers, so I am willing to match the effort that anyone else wants to put in:

• I plan to review and merge pull requests.
  • I am willing to answer questions about the code base.
  • Red Moon is a good (simple) project for learning to code. If you are interested, I am willing to mentor you.
    • See my comment below for details.
• I plan on approximately yearly releases to update translations. Or more often, if someone asks.
  • On f-droid only. If someone wants to release a version on the Play store, you are welcome to (see Unable to purchase from Play Store #148).
• Feel free to continue submitting bug reports and feature requests. They may be useful in the future, and they help other users identify known issues and workarounds.

There are a few things I still plan to do:

• Release version 3.6, which cleans up the interface (adds a dedicated settings screen) and allows selecting one fixed time and the other at sunrise/sunset. (Also remove my email from the app, since it is the source of most spam I recieve.)
• Deal with play store issues — Add brightness controls to persistent notification #247 & Unable to purchase from Play Store #148.
• Update the readme with a summary of this issue.
• Look over the open issues and see if there are any that can be solved with quick fixes, which I may have previously passed over in favor of a more comprehensive solution.

[1] As I write this (2020-12-18), that's a Samsung Galaxy S6 (SM-G920A) running Android 7.0.

I care about software freedom, and I try to run exclusively FLO software on my personal computers. Today I have mostly achieved that (with exceptions for a few messaging apps, for when I'm not willing to ask others to switch to Signal or Matrix), but it was a gradual transition. Most proprietary apps I used had a decent FLO counterpart on f-droid, but there was no screen filter app good enough to replace Twilight. Red Moon, developed by @raatmarien at the time (which built on top of Shades, by @cngu), was the closest, and its code base was easy enough to understand to the junior programmer I was back then, so I started helping out. I didn't plan to become the primary maintainer; it just happened that way, as @raatmarien became busier with other things.

Red Moon is a small enough project that it is possible to get it feature-complete; if every open issue on this repo were fixed, there would be nothing more to do, except keep it working on the latest versions of Android and as many devices as possible — very low effort required. My plan was to get Red Moon to that point, and then basically move on. I still have some interest in that… however, Red Moon is one of many projects I'd like to work on, far more than I will ever have time to complete. And so I have chosen to prioritize those that I feel have the most potential to improve the world.

Today, there are several other screen filter apps looking to solve the exact same problem as Red Moon. It seems like a waste of time to work on this problem when others are doing the exact same thing. I would rather work together to create the single best app we can. I actually proposed this (#222) but despite some initial interest, I was not able to entice the other apps' devs to participate meaningfully. I have no hard feelings towards them, and I'd be willing to help if they wanted to use any of Red Moon's features in their own apps (e.g. automatic pause to exclude apps from filtering). At the same time, I can't deny this hugely decreases my motivation, especially compared to other projects that nobody has attempted before.

As importantly, Android has a built-in blue light filter; I mostly use Red Moon for additional dimming and an automatic backlight control — basically, as a toggle for when I'm reading in bed at night. Building a better screen filter app is not as important as it once was. Through the combination of improvement and increasing irrelevance, my original motivation to work on Red Moon has been solved.

I'd like to think that some day I will return to finish the app. But if I'm being honest — with myself and with you — I will probably switch to gnu/linux phone (pinephone or librem 5) before that happens, and at that point I'm unlikely to return to Android, as a user or developer. In the meantime, I'll keep Red Moon working well enough for myself, or switch to a different app (and update the status here); and I remain interested in improvements that anyone else would like to contribute, and willing to help you with them.