GrayPause

Keep your Android phone in grayscale, and take short color breaks that end by themselves, so you never forget to switch grayscale back on.

Features

• One-tap timers (1/5/10/15/30 min by default), plus custom ones with hours, minutes and seconds. Long-press any timer to delete it.
• Quick Settings tile "Color break": starts a break of the last length used; tap again to end it early.
• Launcher shortcuts: long-press the app icon to start a timer directly.
• Countdown notification with Grayscale now and +5 min.
• Color apps (optional): apps like your gallery or camera are always shown in color. Uses an accessibility service that only sees which app is in front.
• Reboot-safe: a running break is re-armed, or grayscale restored if time ran out.

No internet permission, no tracking, no dependencies beyond the Shizuku client library.

Setup: the one permission

Grayscale is a secure system setting (accessibility_display_daltonizer*), so the app needs WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS. Android has no switch for it in Settings; grant it once:

• Shizuku: start Shizuku, open GrayPause, tap Grant with Shizuku. Shizuku can be stopped afterwards.
• adb:

  adb shell pm grant com.lpw.graypause android.permission.WRITE_SECURE_SETTINGS
  

The grant survives reboots and app updates (not an uninstall).

Building

Standard Gradle project (JDK 17+, Android SDK 36):

gradle assembleRelease      # or ./gradlew

build.sh is an alternative Gradle-free debug build used to develop the app directly on a phone in Termux (native aapt2/javac/apksigner, d8 from the SDK). It needs no Android Studio, and tools/ZipAlign.java stands in for zipalign.

F-Droid

Store texts, icon and screenshots are in fastlane/metadata/android/en-US/ (F-Droid reads them from the source tree). The draft fdroiddata recipe is fdroid/com.lpw.graypause.yml; releases are tagged vX.Y.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE.