gogray.today launched in 2017 after a self-experiment in reducing phone use led me to grayscale mode. What started as a personal test became a website, a body of research, and eventually an iOS app.
In 2017 I was averaging close to five hours a day on my phone and I couldn't really explain what I was doing with any of it. I'd been reading Cal Newport and Tristan Harris and was convinced the problem wasn't willpower — it was design. Colour, push notifications, infinite feeds. Everything on a phone is engineered to pull attention.
At the time, iOS and Android didn't even surface screen-time data to users yet. Apple didn't ship Screen Time until iOS 12 in September 2018. Google didn't ship Digital Wellbeing until August 2018. If you wanted to know how much you were using your phone in 2017, you had to measure it yourself.
The experiment was simple: take the colour away. iOS had a grayscale accessibility setting tucked away in the menus. I flipped it on and lived with it for six months, measuring screen time, pickups, and how I felt.
My daily screen time dropped from 4h 50m to 2h 14m. A 54% reduction, sustained across six months. I stopped reaching for my phone without thinking. Social apps lost their pull almost immediately. Apps I genuinely used — messages, maps, music — still worked the way I needed them to.
I wrote up the experiment, built a small site at gogray.today so other people could find the setting, and published the data. Vice, Motherboard, HuffPost, and YouthTime picked it up between 2017 and 2018. The movement grew — a year before the major phone operating systems shipped any screen-time tools of their own.
The site has evolved into three things: a setup guide for iPhone and Android, a research library with over 30 evidence-based articles on phone addiction and attention, and the Go Gray iOS app — a grayscale scheduler with an app whitelist for the apps where colour still matters.
The original movement is the same as it was in 2017: if you can see your phone the way its designers don't want you to, you reach for it less. Everything else follows from that.
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