That's very weird, does anyone have any insight about this decision on a technical level?
With their own displays, they have full control over that in software, and can produce expected results. It'd be much harder to have predictable results with 3rd party monitors that users configure themselves, so Apple probably opted to outright not support those monitors.
It's also a lot easier to test the feature on a limited combination of hardware.
If for some reason Night Shift were to cause a similar problem, Apple wouldn't want to put effort into fixing it if it happened with third-party displays. By having an official list, they're free to tell people having problems with other hardware "tough luck, sucks to be you."
A hardware solution would be more costly, but it would be the "Apple" way. Be aware that even if you use Flux or Night Shift your display still emits significant blue light.
It could be marketed as a big feature on an Apple keynote, given how much we use devices at night.
Personally I wish there were display options sans backlight.
I always wished there was a display that could be lit by an external lightsource, e.g. a library lamp.
They definitely don’t want to completely drop the short-wavelength primary for many purposes, but it would be nice to have a “late night writing mode” where that is possible.
The real challenge is in developing display backlight and phosphor technology to reproduce colors outside of the standard gamuts.
If you invent a new type of display with a radically different color gamut, and then take existing content and amp up the intensity on hue/value regions with a newly wider gamut, you throw off all of the content creators intentions for color relationships. Total non-starter.
What you can do is show old content about the same as it was on past displays, but then there’s not really any advantage to going with the new technology, which is typically going to be more difficult and expensive to produce. A new display needs new content in order to work differently from past displays.
(Believe me: I have spent years studying human vision and color reproduction technologies. I’m not just making this up.)
If you’re curious about the topic of gamut mapping in general, I recommend this 300-page book, http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047003032... The gamut mapping algorithms used in most common software systems (e.g. Adobe Photoshop) are actually quite poor.
This was a political and marketing decision, to punish customers who use third party devices. This falls neatly into line with Apple's agenda.
Apple refused to support TRIM on SSDs, unless you make on small patch to their kext. I would imagine that there is something similar for this feature.