Three years.
Five big swings.

OLED Guard started as a side project in 2024, born out of frustration with the only options available to OLED owners on Windows: full-screen blackouts that interrupted what you were doing, and pixel-shifters that nudged your desktop a few pixels and called it protection.

The first version proved a simple idea could work — capture the screen, watch where bright static content was sitting, and quietly compose a corrective overlay on top. It was rough. It was single-monitor. But it worked, and it kept working while you used your computer.

V2 took the prototype apart and built a real Windows app around it. Multi-monitor support arrived first — every connected display got its own independent capture and overlay pipeline. DDC/CI brightness control let the app talk to the monitor's firmware directly. Per-app profiles auto-switched presets when foreground apps changed. An automatic controller learned to pick configurations based on what you were doing.

Through V2 we shipped an early protection-mode set: noise, vignette, and mosaic, each with its own shader. Those choices were later replaced by v5's continuous protection field and two appearance-only finishes. The Microsoft Store trial flow went live, the Steam page went up, and a hierarchical test harness started auditing every change with 81 tagged assertions.

By the time we were done, OLED Guard wasn't a side project anymore. It was a 150-commit run that turned a working prototype into something we could ask people to pay for.

V2's engine worked, but it was a stack of heuristics: rules of thumb, threshold tweaks, special cases for HUDs and taskbars. Every new edge case meant another rule. We knew the right answer was deeper, and in April we committed to it.

V3 deletes the heuristic layer entirely. The new engine is built around a single physical quantity — per-pixel exposure, the integral of luminance over time — computed every frame, on the GPU, for every connected display. A motion-envelope shader and a stability detector decide which pixels to protect. An exposure-accumulating shader written from scratch tracks the histogram. The protection field is a function of the model, not a list of rules.

Below the engine, V3 brought a whole physics-first test taxonomy. Layer-bleedthrough tests, oscillation-stability tests, scene-change tests, dynamism gates — 24 out of 24 L4 per-preset suites green. Phase 6 of the V3 redesign closed with the v2 preset fields, properties, and legacy sliders deleted.

If V2 was a tour of features, V3 was the moment OLED Guard stopped guessing.

V3 made the engine feel right. V4 makes the app feel right.

The whole UI moved off WinForms and onto WebView2 + React. The native engine and the Windows interop stay where they were — the bridge boundary is one C# class with a typed message protocol — but the surface you actually look at is now a Chromium-class renderer with first-class developer ergonomics. Window startup is sub-second on a typical machine.

On top of that lives the v4 visual system: a teal accent, a sectioned sidebar, a full-bleed top bar with a live status strip that reads the engine in real time, a dashboard that actually surfaces what the engine is doing, and a refreshed Advanced page that exposes the Auto controller's reasoning so you can watch it work. The new shield mark replaces the placeholder OG monogram across the desktop app and the website.

External links go to the system browser instead of trapping inside the WebView. The About page links to live build, license, and adapter metadata. Hot-plug awareness across the whole monitor list arrived in this run too — plug a USB-C OLED in, the engine picks it up; unplug it, it shuts down cleanly.

And in 4.8, V4 went global. The entire interface is now localized into ten languages, with proper right-to-left layouts for Arabic and Persian. The same release made per-monitor protection choices persistent, taught the engine to fill static gaps faster, and started greeting you with a short what's-new summary after every update.

We're not done. But this is the version we wanted to build all along.

5.0 rebuilt how protection appears on screen. The old stack of overlay passes became a single continuous presentation field: smoother, more even, and finally separate from the exposure model underneath, which keeps tracking real panel physics per pixel. On top of it, Game IQ learns each game's persistent HUD regions locally and brings protection back to them faster, Dark Mode holds a steady uniform dim for dark-first setups, and a Responsiveness control sets the pace.

5.5 is the release where we went looking for the problems users could feel but not name. A deep end-to-end audit of the protection chain, driven by live logs, a purpose-built regression harness, and every report on the feedback board, found and fixed the quiet killers: idle screens misread as capture failures that silently reset protection, scroll motion that erased real exposure history on bright pages, mode and profile switches that wiped buildup, and monitor settings that landed on the wrong panel after docking.

5.8 closes the loop between intelligence and control. Responsiveness now changes how patiently protection builds — Relaxed waits for longer-lasting static content, Balanced uses a natural pace, and Responsive reacts fastest — while changed content clears promptly in every tier. Auto chooses from live context and tells you which tier it selected and why. The overlapping active-window and mouse controls became one focused-app choice, and Protection and Autopilot now have distinct jobs on the dashboard.

Game IQ also learned a stricter separation between memory and what is allowed on screen now. A remembered HUD region is only presented where the current capture still matches, so an old score or message cannot hang over a replay, menu, or replacement scene; the useful exposure history remains underneath. Away Mode now pairs its overlay with DDC/CI brightness reduction on supported monitors, restores each panel's exact prior setting, and reports measured panel-load reduction alongside a clearly labelled OLED pixel-energy estimate.

5.9 is the clean-up that follows a big release. The browser fullscreen freeze was reproduced under load and traced to a live Desktop Duplication session held across the transition, so capture now steps aside for every fullscreen edge. Displays recover from sleep, driver restarts, docking, and mirroring without an app restart, Away Mode covers the whole screen again, startup and hotkey papercuts from the feedback board are closed, and the Statistics page was rebuilt around time-aligned history with honest gaps and wear-weighted screen time.

The theme of V5 is not more switches. It is protection that reacts at the pace you chose, releases when the pixels change, survives the awkward Windows edge cases, and tells you what it is doing.