One slider instead of four buttons: why the flashlight was rearranged

18 August 2026:

Flashlight Pure is at 1.0.8, and the main screen is a different one.

What used to be there

A brightness readout. Below it a strip bar. Below that four buttons: minimum, one third, two thirds, maximum. All four did what the bar did, only in four jumps instead of steplessly. Anyone wanting to set the brightness had three controls for one job.

Now there is an arc. Dragging along it sets the brightness steplessly; tapping the middle switches it on and off. It registers with the accessibility layer as a slider, so it is read out too.

Why at the bottom

The controls now sit in the lower half of the screen, the readout at the top. That sounds like taste, but it is the only arrangement that fits the job: a flashlight is operated one-handed in the dark. The thumb reaches the lower half. What sits at the top has to be looked at; what sits at the bottom can be hit without looking.

27 strings in twelve languages

Going through the translations turned up 27 strings that had stayed English in twelve languages. Not mistranslated: not translated at all. Among them the epilepsy warning on the strobe.

A warning you cannot read is not a warning. They are translated now.

And a bug that was hard to see

If a saved brightness level was above what the device could do, the light did not come on at all. No crash, no message, nothing. It only hits someone who uses the app on one device and then on a weaker one: rare enough that nobody noticed for a long time, and annoying enough that you delete the app afterwards.