GrayGate

Your phone stays calm. Your camera stays colourful.

GrayGate drains the colour out of your phone by default — then hands it back to the handful of apps that actually need it. Camera, Maps, Photos: untouched. Everything else: quiet.

**Pick the short list, not the long one**
Most people find it easier to name the five apps that deserve colour than to hunt down every app that doesn't. Turn on Whitelist mode, choose your exceptions, and you're done. New apps you install are gray automatically — so the calm doesn't erode over time.

Prefer the other direction? Blacklist mode still works exactly how you'd expect: your phone stays in colour and you gray out the specific apps you're fighting with.

**One 60-second setup. Then never again.**
Android doesn't let a normal app touch the display filter, so GrayGate needs one permission granted from a computer. You do it once — not at every reboot, not after updates, not ever again.

1. Turn on USB debugging (about 30 seconds)
2. Plug into any computer — Mac, Windows, or Linux
3. Tap "Copy command" in the app, paste it, press Enter

Then unplug and forget this ever happened. No root. No accessibility service. If you already use a colour-correction filter for colour blindness, GrayGate saves your setting and puts it back.

**It cannot leak what it never collects**
GrayGate makes zero network requests. There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no ad library. Your app list and your selections never leave your device.

- Zero data collection
- No analytics or tracking
- No network requests
- No ads
- No AccessibilityService

**What else is in there**
- Quick Settings tile: cycle Auto, Force Gray, and Force Color from your shade
- Survives reboots — the service comes back on its own
- Sleeps when you do: detection pauses while the screen is off
- Anti-flicker debouncing so system UI transitions don't strobe the screen
- Search and filter your app list
- Material You dynamic colour, light and dark

**Where it falls short**
Being straight with you before you install: Android exposes no true per-app filter to third-party apps, so grayscale covers the whole screen — status bar and nav bar included. Every app in this category shares that limit. There's also about a 1–2 second delay when you switch apps, because detection polls rather than hooking into the system.

**Why grayscale?**
Colour is the hook. Apps are designed with saturated reds and blues precisely because they pull your eye back to the screen. Take the colour away and a lot of that pull just stops. GrayGate lets you keep it exactly where it's useful and remove it everywhere els