Grayscale+ is an Android app that allows the user to enable a gray-scale filter on the smartphone’s screen.

It’s a personal project started recently, initially as an app for myself and then, since it turned out to be easy to use and really effective, I decided to publish it on the Google Play Store.

How to use it

The app is really simple, on the home screen you can find a single switch that enables or disable the grayscale.

But this was not enough sometimes, because it happens often that you really need colors for a short amount of time, but if you turn off the grayscale, you’re really likely to forget to re-enable it, that’s why you can find a toggle that you can easily place in your quick settings, and it works as a timer that helps you to disable the filter for a short time, after this time the filter will automatically come back.

That’s not all if your problem is that you use your phone too much when you’re at work or that you want to stop using your phone while you’re in bed, there’s also a schedule option where you can choose a time window to enable it automatically.

To keep this app fast and not cause battery drain, I used a built-in filter that you can find in the developer options of your phone. Unfortunately, this comes with a downside: you need to run a command from your phone to grant permission to interact with that filter, alternatively, you can grant the same permission with root, here’s the link to the user guide that will help you with this procedure.

But don’t worry, the permission doesn’t grant the app to read your data and this app doesn’t require an internet connection, so you’re safe! To make you feel even safer the code is also open source and you can find it on github.

Home screen screenshot

Why grayscale?

Many studies found that by removing the colors from our device’s screen it gets less attractive and boring, this can help to break phone addiction since many apps like Instagram, Snapchat or Facebook are designed to constantly catch our attention and bring us to the endless scroll we’re all used to. Here there are some articles about it: