Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

This is such an interesting idea. Might as well try it

Edit: didn't last long (about an hour). Needed to show some one a photo and had to turn it off.

> Color pixels drain more energy than grayscale ones. Personally found my phone lasting twice as long as before. Over time, a considerable extension of your phone’s lifespan.

What? Why? Why would you even entertain that as a hypothesis?

I keep it in my control panel so I can flip it on and off easily

I keep on pestering folks who work at Apple to add color filters to the per-app accessibility options, who knows maybe there's someone there who'll read this. (Edit: there is an internal feature request already)

Since iOS of a couple of versions ago, you can trigger color filters on and off from shortcuts, and get a similar behaviour, but it isn't perfect and sometimes glitches. I do this so my photos app and a few others are in color, but the rest are in grey scale.

I questioned the same thing over a decade ago with my then-shiny Samsung Galaxy S5: At the lowest of its low-power battery-saving modes, it drained the color from the screen and made it greyscale.

Perhaps it can make sense for LCDs: After all, LCDs operate by blocking backlight.

Blocking less backlight (by area) by using greyscale might make sense: It seems obvious that a higher perceived brightness can be achieved for any given pixel if using greyscale instead of using colors, just because less of the backlight's area is occluded.

And then: Usability can be maintained while also reducing backlight intensity.

Reduced backlight intensity definitely does have a big effect on battery life.

So -- for LCDs -- it might make sense.

(But even if it makes sense for LCD, the S5 happened to use one OLED variation or another, not LCD. Perhaps there's a non-linear relationship between subpixel brightness and power consumption, and keeping 3 subpixels (RGB) barely-illuminated is more efficient than keeping 1 subpixel (G, say) more-illuminated is?

Or, what I determined to be most-likely at that time: Samsung was simply an uncoordinated wreck that was full of shit.)