A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life | Hacker News Reader

A greyscale iPhone setup that works in everyday life

fabianhemmert.com

145 pointshemmert73 comments

Open articleView on HN

I'd love to see more attention given to what I've called "red mode".

It's a colour filter that, well, makes the screen red.

It's AMAZING for reading at night. Not bright, renders text clearly, amazing on the eyes.

I'd also like to see an eInk phone take off, but this is more doable.

Reduce White Point is also great for reducing max brightness and preserving eye health

I too have had a shortcut for “red filter” + “minimal brightness” + “reduced brightness” for years.

I trigger it by a Triple back tap.

Great for night usage with our eye strain or bothering your spouse

Could you share it?

I think they’re talking about going to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut. I just realized this was a thing, very nice.

My BMW defaults to orange / reddish for night time and I’ve often thought it’s very easy on the eyes.

My setup is: dark mode, color filters tint red, brightness 0, and reduce white point. It’s almost completely unusable in regular lit rooms, but nice in complete darkness (mostly apps like Instapaper).

The main issue I have is that blue text is unreadable. I wish you could stack color filters like grayscale first, then red tint.

There’s night shift by default in your iphone right? You can use the slider to make it more pronounced.

It only gives you a really light yellow-ish tint. It helps, but more tint (full red) helps more.

Yes, and I have that enabled all day, but red light is much more pleasant to look at at night and helps induce sleep: https://www.sleepfoundation.org/bedroom-environment/is-red-l...

For something like this on Android I've been using Twilight for years now.

I use that. It’s nice. I just wish I could mix it with black and white mode because the way the filter works makes blue things unreadable and it generally messes with color rendering more than it would need to.

Zoom's filter applies before Color Filters, so a workaround is to toggle on zoom, set it to greyscale, then use the 3 finger gesture to zoom out to 100%.

Using my phone in grayscale convinced me of the power of shiny colours. It is shocking how boring my phone feels in grayscale.

This really does help break any feeling of attachment to the device and the solutions in this post really do make it more practical. It does kind of suck using the camera in grayscale.

Why do you think Pokemon makes the cards super bright and shiny :)

No need to get specific. Look at any retail packaging. Look at any advertisement. Bright and shiny always gets the attention. You've never read anyone reply "ooh, grayscale". It's always "Ooooh, shiny"

Apple does a pretty good job of extracting dopamine from black and white packaging.

It's just for the fans, I doubt it's appealing to someone who doesn't recognize it.

Setting up triple click to toggle greyscale on or off in accessibility settings whenever I need color enabled works much better for me

What?! And miss out on setting up 72 automations for different apps that sometimes bug out?

It’s 1 automation for all apps

The clever insight here is that it automates turning grayscale back on whenever you leave (or alternatively open) an app

Originally I had grayscale mode on and it reduced my phone usage a ton, but I stopped because it got in the way of photos and camera, things like that. I changed to using the triple click accessibility shortcut but I found it relied too much on me having to remember to turn the grayscale mode back on. This automates it so I’ll try it and hopefully it helps reduce phone usage more.

Tried turning on greyscale mode and I am surprised by how effectively it works in making me not want to use the phone.

Not sure if it's the lack of color in general or because screens kind of turn into a black and white mush that's hard to navigate.

I think it is a mix of both. Grey scale reduces the vividness of everything, but also none of these apps are really designed with grey scale in mind.

Greyscale can be very cool and easy to use if built for it. Just look at Mac's before they went colour as an example.

I turned off all notifications, put the phone away upside down and same effect.

I've bound toggling greyscale on/off to pressing the lock-button 3 times, makes it very easy to switch back/forth when you need it, but still be able to leave it greyscale most of the time.

I do this too but often forget to turn it back on when I need it off (e.g. for maps or for looking at a picture)

I just recently got an eink phone to focus more and work/do stuff in sunlight (always sunny here); samsung and iPhone kept overheating and are barely readable in some cases, even just having a coffee in the morning. It really helps focus on just spending my time in the terminal or in chat for instance and, while it actually really nice to work in one app, switching sucks so it works well. I could not have it as my only device, but next to an iPhone or android, it is been great so far.

This is actually very neat, my phone is already setup with grayscale and triple tap to turn on red light filter so I’m exited to add that!

Little plug since we’re in the topic of dumb phones etc, I have a completely free and non-creepy iPhone app launcher for folks who are into that:

- https://sxp.studio/apps/applist

(The app catalog is also open source)

Where’s the source?

https://github.com/sxp-studio/app-list-catalog

How to switch on/off your computer with Windows 10/11 to greyscale mode

1. Press Windows Key + U to open the Accessibility/Ease of Access menu.

2. Click on Color filters on the left pane.

3. Toggle the Turn on color filters switch to On.

4. Select Grayscale from the list of options. (should be preselected by default)

5. Now you can switch on/off greyscale mode anywhere with Windows key+Ctrl+C shortcut.

Can remember how I set it up. Tap the back of my iphone 3 times and it toggles greyscale.

Makes taking and looking at photos nice.

That's pretty nifty -- how to you register taps on back with automation?

Also, since I had an atari st as my first 'serious" computer, I loved the B&W monitor and b&W GEM.

I'm still looking for a way to preserve the low-color feel for my macbooks and mac desktops. Also I love the idea of low-dopamine UIs in principle.

For same reasons as the original author, I find myself to abandon the B&W mode and then do not turn it back on later.

I'd envision OS layer that handles the desktop, finder and apps, and an API that apps like browsers can use, e.g. in chrome extensions.

Anyone here aware of work in that area?

It’s in the accessibility settings. You can assign an action for double or triple tap.

Never knew that tapping the back of the phone did anything. Yet another Apple convention you only discover by accident?

More like an accessibility setting that has widespread utility (there are several others, e.g. iOS has built-in background noise generators in accessibility)

That said, tapping on the back of the phone didn’t register consistently enough for me to utilize. I tried setting flashlight to that action. When I wanted it to work it wouldn’t. Then when I would be absentmindedly tapping it would activate.

It’s an “accessibility” feature. You can assign an action to double and triple tap. But it’s very inconsistent. It doesn’t work half the time and it will trigger randomly if you move your phone funny.

Have been in using greyscale on and off to reduce my screen time. Due the issues that the author reported I switched back and changed the icon colors to monocolor grey with black wallpaper to atleast keep the phone default UI color free.

The first behaviour it changed is making app logos of Instagram, YouTube, Reddit stand out. Some of these apps became a reflex click when I unlock my phone usually as a fidget. Greyscale takes away the lure of these app icons.

Love the shortcuts tip. Setting it up to see if I can sustain greyscale full time now.

I use perpetual night mode blue light filter, it just feels cozy enough

Grayscale was a functional problem because some pics communicate with color (like colored maps) so it nudged me away

Accessibility > Vibration > Off

Removes a lot of purposefully rewarding/manipulating haptics. Makes a phone feel "quiet" and easier to put down.

What apps were vibrating that much? I live in Do Not Disturb mode so I don’t have sounds for alerts.

This is such a clever way to automate so that the setup actually works. I just set it up, and wonder why the author didn’t set it up to trigger grayscale on app opening. I noticed that app switching also isn’t considered closing an app, so it seems most reliable to trigger on app open as well as close

It works for me when switching.

Interesting idea, but it would be nice to preserve very minimal signal from color, tunable as one feels, something like this with Stylus extension:

  @-moz-document domain("youtube.com") {
  body { filter: grayscale(95%)contrast(110%); }
  }

I’ve been doing exactly this (with the shortcuts) for almost 3 years now. I don’t think it’s as powerful as I would like but it’s certainly helped. I do wish more apps worked in grayscale (calendar I’m looking at you) but that’s on my long list of grievances.

I switched to a nxtpaper pro phone which has a hardware switch for bw vs color modes and an e-ink like display (not as good but close enough)

I love it, mostly because it forces me to use phone less..

This is great, would love to see a similar way to do it in Android.

I don't know of any way to control the setting automatically (sometimes there are special-permission non-standard/undocumented intents for settings though), but as a maybe-close-enough you can turn on grayscale color correction (in accessibility -> color & motion, in my phone) and add a quick-settings tile to toggle it.

You can also use one of the accessibility shortcuts to trigger it quickly (both volume buttons held, triple tap, two fingers from bottom) if so configured

I'm on a Pixel 10 for these instructions, not sure if other manufacturers offer the same options.

Modes is an available option in the tile list. You can go to Modes, create a custom mode, and under display options you can set greyscale. You can also set modes to turn on automatically based on calendar events or a schedule. Notification tweaks are also available in the same area.

Yes, Modes / Display Settings / Greyscale.

Having it in the tile list makes it super easy - make sure the Modes tile is near the top, so it becomes a single swipe to switch it on and off.

But app contrast is generally better on Android than on iOS (in particular, Google Maps is perfectly usable in greyscale on Android) so you might find you don't need to switch it as often as you might think.

Agreed, it's pretty rare that you'll need to turn it off. The default theming color selection does a good job making sure that lightness is different, so virtually all not-completely-custom-styled apps work with all kinds of color blindness.

Samsung routines can do this.

There's likely a way to do with via Tasker/MacroDroid but you'll likely need to use Shizuku (or possibly root) to change these system settings.

On a Pixel phone, you can do Accessibility -> Color Mode

This is fantastic! I had greyscale on many years ago, but I had to turn turn colours back on for google maps... but this trick allows me to have my cake and eat it too!

Looking at the example images, I was actually shocked that the app was so low contrast in B&W to be unusable. At least apps from Apple/Google. I would have expected their usability teams to be all over it, while expecting smaller app devs to need a pass on this.

My addiction isn’t the phone, it’s the computer, Youtube specifically. And I can’t use greyscale due to creative Photoshop work. Kingdom to whomever solves my problem.

Get yourself a greyscale browser filter so photoshop isn't affected. This is the first result I got; I'm sure there are better ones

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/grayscale-screen/mc...

it is much easier just to set up accessibility color filter and then toggle greyscale mode with Winkey+Ctrl+C and you can keep using your apps without installing anything

How to switch on/off your computer with Windows 10/11 to greyscale mode

1. Press Windows Key + U to open the Accessibility/Ease of Access menu.

2. Click on Color filters on the left pane.

3. Toggle the Turn on color filters switch to On.

4. Select Grayscale from the list of options. (should be preselected by default)

5. Now you can switch on/off greyscale mode anywhere with Windows key+Ctrl+C shortcut.

Does running greyscale help with energy conservation?

Probably not. OLED screens use less energy the more absolute dark pixel in the screen, and darker anything (can be greyscale or color) consume somewhat less than brighter anything, but greyscale on its own usually don't change how much absolute dark and darker pixels being displayed, unless you also tweak the brightness. Usually, the color filter is applied at the end of the process, so the GPU don't get to skip any calculation.

If it makes you use your device less, then you do save energy a bit.

jinx! looks like we answered a 5 hour old question at the same time ha!

I still appreciate the answer(s)!

Doubtful, the screen is still the same, same amount of light is getting projected, same amount of graphics calculations is still happening. If there's any impact it's probably quite low, maybe less than 0.0001%

For me grayscale was too radical but you can decrease color intensity too. It also useful for against addiction.

This solution is a really great argument for Apple(/Google) just adding per-app color settings.

This blog needed a video honestly, I tried to set it up but haven’t yet

This is awesome, hope it helps me squash my YouTube addiction

Clever!

I want my phone to be greyscale (low-dopamine), but some apps need color. Here's my workaround that works for me (triple-pressing the side button didn't, I forget to turn greyscale back on.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com