Android’s Flashlight Is Finally Getting a Long Overdue Feature

The flashlight toggle has been a quintessential smartphone feature ever since they started getting LEDs for camera flashes. However, many Android phones haven’t had much control over how it works—you simply turn it on or off. Thankfully, an upcoming feature should make the flashlight more useful.

All the way back in Android 13, Google added support for controlling the flashlight brightness. The problem is it never included a way to access that control natively, so we’ve been relying on third-party apps to do it. Earlier this year, Google finally introduced a slider to control the brightness of the flashlight in an Android Canary build. Now, we’re seeing a more polished version of the UI as it gets closer to a stable release.

The functionality is pretty simple. Instead of a basic on/off toggle, the flashlight Quick Settings button opens a pop-up with a slider to adjust the brightness. In previous builds, this was a minimal horizontal slider, but in the most recent Android Canary release, it’s a bit more playful. The pop-up now shows a flashlight icon, and you slide the brightness along a beam of light. The tile also displays the brightness percentage.

Android is playing a bit of catch-up when it comes to flashlight brightness controls. The iPhone has had the ability to adjust brightness since 2020. At first, it only had four levels of brightness to choose from. More recently, however, you not only have infinite control of the brightness, but also the spread of the light. Oh, how far we’ve come.

Sadly, this updated UI and the flashlight controls seem to be far from the final release still. It was not included in Android 16 QPR2 beta, which is scheduled to go stable in December. That means it will likely be saved for Android 16 QPR3, which won’t arrive until March 2026. Samsung Galaxy phones already have this functionality, but I’m not sure why such a simple thing has taken essentially over three years to be native.

Source: Android Authority