Making specific apps on my Android phone display in grayscale

Question

I'm trying to curtail idle phone and tablet use. This article proposes making your phone boring by making it display in grayscale.

Most phones (including mine) let you render everything in greyscale for accessibility reasons. However, there are certain apps I that want to use in full color. So I'm looking for an Android app that allows me to pick and choose exactly which apps are drawn in grayscale. Does such an app exist? More specifically:

• It's okay if my phone has to be rooted.
• I don't care whether or not system overlays (e.g. the battery indicator, notifications) are drawn in color or not.
• It's okay if my home screen isn't affected; I'll just use a grey background and icon set.

If no such apps exist, which APIs could I use to write my own?

Answer 1

I'm a bit late to the party, I understand that this question has been asked almost 3 years ago. But I figured in case somebody finds it via Google and is still searching for an answer, I will reply anyway.

I am the developer of the open-source app "DetoxDroid" which does exactly that: Render your screen grayscale while allowing certain apps to be excluded ("whitelisted" / allow-listed) from that setting.

You can find it on GitHub: https://github.com/flxapps/DetoxDroid

Answer 2

You can do it with tasker, which is an app to automate your android phone. this app triggers actions(tasks) when a condition(profile) is met.

First you have to search the color correction setting and choose grayscale.

In tasker, We have to create a task(Grayscale on) to turn grayscale on, so we this type of task: Settings > Custom setting And give it the name of the setting we want to modify, for enable color correction the setting is 'accessibility_display_daltonizer_enabled' and we assign it a value of 1.

Now, you have to create another task(Grayscale off) and it'll be the same, but with a value of 0.

Once we have our task ready, we create a profile with the applications we want to display in grayscale and assign the task grayscale on when the applications are opened and obviously assign the task grayscale off when the applications are closed.