You will get a pop-up notification once this is doneģ. Tap “Build number” seven times to become a developer. Navigate to Settings | About phone (you may need to go a step further into Software Info or some such in some models)Ģ. Making your Android screen black and white is a tad more difficult and, bizarrely, involves tapping the same option seven times.ġ. Tap Greyscale under the Vision subsection. Head to Settings | General | AccessibilityĢ. Meanwhile, in older versions of iOS, you should follow these two steps:ġ. Go to Settings | General | Accessibility | Display Accommodations | Colour filters The menus vary slightly in the different versions of iOS, but in iOS 10:ġ. Turning your iPhone greyscale is a cinch. So have you been won over to the dark side? If so, follow the instructions below to turn your iOS or Android phone black and white. All of your photos will also look like an arthouse collection – but bear in mind that the images will immediately return to colour as soon as you upload or share them. This is especially true with the ubiquitous Spotify: drained of all colour, even the most innocuous album cover suddenly looks like it’s by a Norwegian black metal band.
The first is that turning your screen black and white makes everything look a little grim. This very much depends on other factors, such as the brightness of your screen, but I found it to be a welcome break from the usual bombardment of bright colours. Moreover, as with the E-Ink technology used in Amazon’s Kindles, making the change could help reduce eye strain. It’s certainly worked for me: after only two days with a greyscale phone, I now scroll through Twitter a lot less and hesitate before jumping down a YouTube rabbit hole (it turns out cat videos aren’t quite the same in black and white). In 2017, on the other hand, looking at your smartphone’s app drawer is an experience akin to the trippy “Star Gate” sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Primary-coloured logos shout for your attention, while bright-red notifications signal impending doom and drain your battery.īut what if there was a way to cut through the visual noise? How can you focus on the all-important content, rather than the visual noise? Well, turning your phone’s screen black and white could be the answer.įar from being retrograde for the sake of being retrograde, going monochrome could help combat a smartphone addiction. They were innocent days, when our only worry was getting sore thumbs from playing hours of Snake. There was once a time when all mobile phone screens – long before they became anything resembling “smart” – were either black and white or the sickly green favoured by Nokia.