How to Turn On Grayscale on iPhone, and Does It Help?

Grayscale is the lowest-effort trick in the screen time book: it’s built into every iPhone, takes a few taps, and turns Instagram into something that looks like a fax. It’s also one of the better-studied phone tricks. Here’s how to set it up so it’s easy to live with, and what the studies say it can and can’t do.

How do you turn on grayscale on iPhone?

To turn on grayscale on iPhone, go to Settings > Accessibility > Display & Text Size > Color Filters, turn on Color Filters, then tap Grayscale. Apple’s guides for iOS 27 and iOS 26 give the same path.

1. Open Settings and tap Accessibility.
2. Tap Display & Text Size, then Color Filters.
3. Turn on Color Filters and choose Grayscale from the list.

The whole screen goes black and white, including photos and video. Apple notes that color filters can change the look of images and videos, so expect your camera roll to look like an old newspaper until you switch it back.

How do you turn grayscale on and off quickly?

The fastest way to toggle grayscale is the Accessibility Shortcut: set it once, then triple-click the side button (or the Home button on iPhones that have one) to switch grayscale on or off.

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility > Accessibility Shortcut.
2. Select Color Filters.
3. Triple-click the side button or Home button.

If Color Filters is the only feature you select, Apple’s guide to accessibility shortcuts says it turns on or off immediately. Pick more than one and you get a short menu to choose from. The same page explains how to add accessibility controls to Control Center, if you’d rather swipe than click.

A quick toggle cuts both ways. It makes grayscale easy to live with when you need color for a minute, and it makes it just as easy to switch off for good. That’s worth knowing before you rely on it.

Can you make only some apps grayscale?

Yes, two Shortcuts automations can turn your iPhone gray only in the apps you choose. Your screen goes gray when you open the apps you scroll most and go back to color when you leave them. Apple’s Shortcuts guide says an automation can run when an app opens, and lists App among the automations that can run without asking you first. The option to run when an app closes comes from the iDownloadBlog walkthrough below.

1. In Settings, set Color Filters to Grayscale once, then turn Color Filters off again. The automation switches the filter you picked.
2. In the Shortcuts app, create an automation with the App trigger, choose the apps (say Instagram and TikTok), and set it to run when they’re opened. Its action is Set Color Filters, turned on.
3. Create a second automation for the same apps, set to run when they’re closed, with Set Color Filters turned off.
4. Set both to run without asking, or you’ll get a prompt every time.

A February 2026 walkthrough by iDownloadBlog starts from the Automation tab, picks Run Immediately, and uses the same two-automation setup the other way round (color only in Camera and Photos). Apple’s current guide adds the trigger from inside a shortcut instead: tap Edit, then Automation. Menu labels shift between versions, so if a button name doesn’t match, look for the nearest equivalent.

Per-app grayscale is a nice compromise. Maps, photos and your calendar keep their colors, and the feeds lose theirs.

Does grayscale actually reduce screen time?

Grayscale reduced screen time in every study we could check, though all of them are small and short. People used their phones roughly 20 to 38 minutes a day less with grayscale on, and the one randomized experiment found it worked faster than setting time limits.

Study	Who	Design	Result
Holte and Ferraro, 2020	161 undergraduates, 73 switched to grayscale	8 to 10 days in grayscale, compared with their own earlier use	About 38 minutes a day less screen time; less social media and browsing; video time unchanged
Zimmermann and Sobolev, 2023	112 people	Preregistered randomized experiment over several weeks: grayscale vs self-set time limits vs tracking only	Grayscale cut objectively measured screen time right away compared with tracking only; time limits cut it less and more gradually
Dekker and Baumgartner, 2023	84 people, phone use tracked	One normal week, then one week in grayscale	About 20 minutes a day less; number of unlocks unchanged
Hagerty et al., 2026	51 first-year medical students	One week in grayscale and one in color, order alternated	About 28 minutes a day less, self-reported from the phone’s built-in screen time tracker
Wickord and Quaiser-Pohl, 2023	92 people who finished both surveys	At least 24 hours in grayscale, use reported by questionnaire	Usage time went down

Only the 2023 experiment with 112 people is described as randomized. The 2020 study had a comparison group, but its screen time result compares the grayscale group with its own earlier use, and the 2023 study of 84 people had no comparison group at all. Before-and-after designs can’t rule out that people would have cut back anyway once they knew they were being studied. The medical student study relied on people copying their own numbers into a survey, and its authors call the result preliminary.

What doesn’t grayscale fix?

Grayscale makes your phone less tempting to look at, but it doesn’t change the habit of picking it up. In the 2023 study of 84 people, daily screen time dropped about 20 minutes while the number of unlocks stayed the same, which the authors read as a sign of deep-rooted checking habits.

Video is the other gap. In the 2020 study, students spent less time on social media and browsing in grayscale, but their video time didn’t budge. A black-and-white video is still a video, and a lot of feeds are video now.

The effects on how people feel are mixed:

• Anxiety and depression: in the 2020 study, symptoms improved in both the grayscale group and the comparison group, so grayscale didn’t account for the change.
• Well-being and grades: the 2023 randomized experiment found no immediate effect of cutting usage on well-being or academic performance.
• Feeling in control: in the 2023 study of 84 people, people reported more control over their phone use and less stress in the grayscale week, with no change in productivity or sleep quality.

And it’s easy to route around. One medical student in the 2026 study said they “ended up just using my laptop instead”. If you have a laptop or tablet nearby, the scroll can simply move there.

Is grayscale annoying to live with?

Grayscale can be annoying, mostly because color does real work on a phone. Photos, maps, calendar colors and some app icons are harder to read in gray. The per-app automation above solves most of that, and the triple-click shortcut handles the rest.

Two more things. Night Shift doesn’t fight it: Apple’s guide says Night Shift removes color filter effects except grayscale. And if your screen ever turns gray on its own, check the Accessibility Shortcut first. With Color Filters as its only feature, a stray triple-press of the side button is enough to switch it.

If you keep scrolling in black and white

Grayscale is friction, and friction only slows you down. If you find yourself watching gray videos at 11 p.m., the next step is a limit that blocks the app rather than dulling it. Apple’s own Screen Time limits are the place to start, with a passcode someone else holds, because, as we cover in why Screen Time’s limit never sticks, a limit you can wave away usually gets waved away.

StepGate, the app we make, is another option, built on Apple’s Screen Time tools. You pick the apps, categories or websites to lock in Apple’s own picker, and they stay locked until you hit a daily step goal you choose, from 3,000 to 15,000 steps. Then every locked app opens for the rest of the day. Open a locked app early and you see “Instagram is locked.” with what’s left said as a walk, like “A 15-minute walk”, and one button: Go walk.

It isn’t a vault. You can pause the lock for 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes and it comes back on its own, keep rest days, and set the hours it runs. Where grayscale makes the feed duller, StepGate makes it cost a walk. StepGate needs a StepGate Plus subscription and an iPhone on iOS 17 or later. How it works has the details, and the screen time to steps calculator shows what your daily scrolling would add up to in steps.

Where to start

Turn on grayscale tonight and put Color Filters on the Accessibility Shortcut so it’s easy to keep. Check your Screen Time number in a week. If it’s dropped, keep going. If it hasn’t, try the other fixes in how to stop doomscrolling, or follow the 14-day plan to reduce screen time on iPhone.