It’s been a long time since an Android update excited me, though I’m fine with that. It gives me more time to visit every nook and corner of the operating system, especially the ones I’ve ignored all my life.
I don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions, but I promised myself that I’d extensively use and study the impact of every Android setting on my smartphone usage.
We’re halfway through the year, and I’m proud that I have managed to keep my promise so far.
In these six months, I’ve found some handy Android features in Settings I didn’t know existed. Then there were those that I already knew about but never really used on my phone.
I recently used one such feature on my phone. I experimented with Android’s Grayscale feature for two weeks, and it changed the way I interact with social media. Here is how.
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Grayscale made my phone ugly — and that’s exactly the point
Black and white and all their shades are my favorite, but not every color suits everywhere. They make the screen look dull, and that’s the only reason I could never sit for a couple of hours to watch a black-and-white movie.
I didn’t expect anything different when I turned on Grayscale mode, which removed all colors from my phone display to make it boring.
Although I planned to push myself to use Grayscale for at least two weeks, I never believed I could survive a colorless phone for that long.
What motivated me to keep using it was how drastically it reduced my screentime. I could do it because the Grayscale mode made social media boring, which is where I was spending most of my time on my phone.
I unknowingly stopped endlessly scrolling social media because Grayscale removed one of the biggest addictive factors from those platforms: visual stimulation.
Social media with Grayscale turned on couldn’t give the excitement of scrolling through feeds to check out photos and videos. It couldn’t draw my attention to notifications, either.
The red DM notification badge on Instagram was meant to grab users’ attention, but when you turn on Grayscale, that red DM notification turns to a shade of black, killing the urgency.
I didn’t even notice that two of my friends sent me a DM on Instagram with the Grayscale mode enabled.
To enable it, open the Settings app on your Android phone, type Grayscale in the search bar, then enable the Grayscale and Use color correction toggles. This will turn the bright display colors to shades of gray.
It took only a couple of days — and not the entire two weeks — for me to notice the difference. It was a happy accident, and I liked what I achieved in that short time frame.
However, I never expected this to change my relationship with social media forever. After the two-week experiment, I now use social media with a purpose rather than on impulse.
How do I use Grayscale smartly?
However, I don’t use my smartphone only for social media. I also spend significant time editing articles in Word or Google Docs on my phone.
With the Grayscale mode turned on, the red underlines in Word turned gray, so I couldn’t catch typos as quickly as I would have liked.
Online shopping is even more complicated because you can’t tell whether an item is black, blue, or green.
This is why it isn’t worthwhile to keep your phone colorless all the time. I use it when I open any social media app on my phone.
However, I don’t dig for Grayscale mode through settings every time I enable it before I use social media apps. Instead, I set the mode to Grayscale once and then enabled the Color correction shortcut.
This brings the Color correction toggle to the edge of my display, and all I need to do is tap it, and the entire screen displays everything in shades of gray.
I also turn on the toggle at night so that I can go to sleep early.
App timers are a great way to restrict social media, but it ends your session abruptly.
This is where the Grayscale feature comes in handy — it naturally pulls you out of the scrolling loop by making content on social media less engaging.
This is far better than something that forces me to stop using an app.
While the App timers feature is still effective, it hasn’t encouraged a lasting behavioral change in me. Grayscale, on the other hand, taught me to use social media with a purpose.
That’s the kind of lasting behavioral change I wanted, and I finally have it.
