Intro

This setup lets me smash sub-hour screentimes and I hope it might help you as I've spent a lot of time honing it! Let me know if you have any tips to further my setup and please share yours!

I used a Hisense A5 eink smartphone for over two years. Great phone but a horrible camera. After two years it was bettered as hell and I did miss being able to take and share to my family photographs that didn't look horrific. The eink screen had totally changed my relationship with my phone so I wanted to recreate the grayscale experience on a normal smartphone. I'm really happy with things after a couple of months.

My personal rule is to have nothing on my phone to allows me to browse social media, the internet, or video content. That includes no app-stores, and having no apps that have an in-app browser. For example with Facebook Messenger I would cheat by messaging myself a link to a website and clicking on the link to view it on the in-app browser. In this case I can use Messenger Lite instead which has no in-app browser.

Setup

The basic instructions would be:

• Buy a Google Pixel phone- mine is the Pixel 4a which I bought used for 120 USD. Pixel phones generally have the most support for 3rd party stripped-down operating systems such as LineageOS, CalyxOS, GrapheneOS.

• (Optional) As my phone is older, I installed Lineage operating system to remove Google junk from my phone and receive long device support. You can do your own research on how to do this.

• Research how to use Android Developer Bridge (ADB) on your computer and use it to remove any junk from your phone. For me that includes any app-stores/browsers/bloat. A tip is to use the disable command rather than uninstall to remove any built-in apps as uninstalled apps will often return when your phone updates.

• As I don't have any app-stores on my phone, I use ADB to install app APK files from my computer to the phone. If I'm in a rush I sometimes WhatsApp the APK files from my computer to my phone. Apps can be downloaded to your computer with a fairly high level of security from APK Pure, APK Mirror, f-droid, Github etc.

Automatically switching grayscale:

Now to recreate the eink effect. My experience in using the grayscale/monochrome mode on phones in the past was that I wouldn't stick with them in grayscale. I'd eventually toggle-on colour and leave it like that. So...we need to automate the colour mode when we're using an app we'd like in colour (in my case that's the camera app and the gallery app), and have it automatically switch back to grayscale once we're done. To do that we can use a great app called Gray-switch https://apkpure.com/gray-switch-grayscale/com.vegardit.grayswitch/download/24202-APK.

Make the phone as displeasing as possible to use

• Disable system animations

• Disable fingerprint/face unlock

• Disable lift to wake

• Disable wake screen on notification

• Disable any junk/pointless notifications

• Possibly disable notifications from the home screen

• Keep your phone on silent as much as possible

Apps

Mapping:

With no Google Play Services, Google Maps will not normally work.

• I use GMaps WV for public-transport directions. It's the browser version of Google Maps wrapped up into an app. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/us.spotco.maps/

• For walking/driving I love Organic Maps https://f-droid.org/en/packages/app.organicmaps/. I have tried all the OSM based map apps and this ones is really superb

Messaging:

Nothing special here.

• Signal

• Whatsapp

Audio:

Nothing special here.

• Spotify

• Pocketcasts

Utilities:

Nothing special here.

• Monzo Bank

• Librera FD (PDF reader)

• Screentime (Screentime monitor) https://github.com/markusfisch/ScreenTime

• Gray-switch (automate grayscale on/off)

• https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/ this syncs contacts and cal to Nextcloud

Camera

• install the 'photos' variant of this. https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/gcam-camera-px-for-google-pixel-1-2-3-3a-4.3875663/page-148#post-84362529.
• Install this camera APK https://www.celsoazevedo.com/files/android/google-camera/dev-MWP/f/dl17/
• Install Nextcloud to sync photos
• Install this app to view nextcloud photostream. https://gitlab.com/nkming2/nc-photos/-/wikis/Release

Remaining problems:

• For me, the main problem is I can't use apps with browsers baked-in. I would like to use WeChat to keep in touch with some people I know in China but it would break that rule.