# Mobile recipes — no code, no app to install

Step-by-step instructions a person follows themselves. No coding agent, no sideloading, no
development toolchain. Content source for the site's iOS and Android result pages.

Compiled by Jacob Kao, August 2026. Menu paths verified against public documentation and
walkthroughs current to early 2026 — **Apple, Google and Samsung all move these menus, so every
recipe on the site should carry a "paths change; if you can't find it, search Settings for the
term in bold" note.**

---

## How to read this

**Permission tiers.** This is the honest axis for mobile, and it should be visible on every
recipe.

- **Tier 1 — OS-native, no new permissions.** Apple's Shortcuts, Samsung's Modes and Routines,
  Pixel Modes, Digital Wellbeing. Already on the phone, already trusted by the OS, nothing to
  grant. **Almost everything worth doing is here.**
- **Tier 2 — third-party automation using Usage Access only.** MacroDroid and Tasker in
  polling/legacy mode. Usage Access lets an app see which app is in the foreground. Meaningful but
  narrow.
- **Tier 3 — third-party automation using Accessibility Service.** The default mode for
  MacroDroid's and Tasker's app-launch triggers. Accessibility Service can read and act on
  everything on your screen, and it is the most abused permission on Android. **Avoid.** If a
  recipe needs it, use the Tier 2 legacy mode instead and accept that it is less reliable.

**A note on cost of exit, stated up front.** Every recipe below can be turned off in under a
minute by the person who set it up. These are interventions against *habit*, not against
*intent* — they interrupt the automatic reach, and they will not stop a determined decision. If
you want something that genuinely holds, the honest answers are a Screen Time or Digital
Wellbeing passcode held by someone else, or leaving the phone in another room.

**One finding worth knowing before you start.** The interruptive-pause intervention with the
strongest published evidence in this category is delivered, in its commercial form, through
exactly this mechanism — an app-open automation that inserts a brief pause. You are not
approximating something better with a worse tool. You are building the same thing by hand.

---

# iPhone and iPad

All iOS recipes are Tier 1. Everything uses the built-in **Shortcuts** app plus Settings.

## The universal setup, used by most recipes below

Learn this once; the recipes then say "make an App Opened automation."

1. Open **Shortcuts** → **Automation** tab (bottom) → **+** (top right).
2. Scroll to **App** and tap it.
3. Tap **Choose**, select the app or apps you want to trigger on, tap **Done**.
4. Leave **Is Opened** checked. Uncheck **Is Closed** unless the recipe says otherwise.
5. Tap **Run Immediately**. This is the step people miss — without it you get a notification you
   have to tap, which defeats the purpose.
6. Turn **Notify When Run** *off*. There is no global switch for this; you must do it per
   automation.
7. Tap **Next**, then build the shortcut from the actions the recipe lists.

**To undo any automation:** Shortcuts → Automation → swipe left on it → Delete. Or tap it and
toggle **Enable This Automation** off to pause without losing the setup.

---

### iOS 1 — Grayscale everywhere except the apps that need colour ★
**Mechanism:** environmental friction. **Harm:** time displacement, exposure. **Effort:** 5 min.

The flagship recipe. Colour is a large part of what makes feeds rewarding; removing it degrades
the reward without blocking anything. The trick is the exception list — grayscale is annoying in a
camera, and a version you abandon after two days is worth nothing.

1. **Settings** → **Accessibility** → **Display & Text Size** → **Color Filters** → toggle on,
   choose **Grayscale**. Your whole phone is now grey.
2. Make an **App Opened** automation (universal setup above) for the apps you want in colour —
   **Camera** and **Photos** at minimum. Add anything visual you actually care about: a maps app,
   a design tool, a shopping app you use deliberately.
3. Actions: add **Set Color Filters** and set it to **Off**.
4. Make a **second** automation for the *same* apps, but this time check **Is Closed** and
   uncheck **Is Opened**. Action: **Set Color Filters** → **On**.

Colour appears when you open those apps and disappears when you leave them.

**Weakness:** the "Is Closed" trigger is less reliable than "Is Opened" — if you end up stuck in
colour, add an **Accessibility Shortcut** (Settings → Accessibility → Accessibility Shortcut →
Color Filters) so a triple-click of the side button toggles it manually.

**Undo:** delete both automations and turn Color Filters off in Settings.

### iOS 2 — Grayscale only inside the problem app
**Mechanism:** environmental friction, targeted. **Effort:** 3 min.

The inverse, and easier to live with if full-time grey is too much.

1. **App Opened** automation for Instagram/TikTok/X → action **Set Color Filters** → **On**.
2. Second automation, **Is Closed** for the same apps → **Set Color Filters** → **Off**.

**Why choose this one:** it isolates the intervention to the moment it matters, so there is no
daily cost elsewhere. **Why choose iOS 1 instead:** a phone that is grey by default treats colour
as the exception, which is a stronger frame — and it catches apps you didn't think to name.

**Weakness:** it only fires for apps you named, so it misses the ones you reach for without
thinking. If you keep discovering new offenders, switch to iOS 1.

**Undo:** Shortcuts → Automation → delete both automations.

### iOS 3 — The pause ★
**Mechanism:** interruptive friction — the best-evidenced mechanism in the research.
**Harm:** time displacement, interference. **Effort:** 5 min.

1. **App Opened** automation for the app in question.
2. Actions, in order:
   - **Show Alert** — text: something you wrote yourself, in your own words. Not "Do you really
     need this?" Something specific: *"You said you wanted your evenings back."* Turn **Show
     Cancel Button** on.
   - **Wait** — 10 seconds. Add this *before* the alert if you want the delay to be
     unskippable.

**Design notes from the research.** Ten seconds is roughly where the published work sits; longer
is not obviously better and much longer gets uninstalled. Write the alert text yourself and
rewrite it when you stop reading it — a prompt that has appeared identically four hundred times is
no longer information. That habituation is documented, not hypothetical.

**Weakness:** an alert is dismissible in one tap and becomes wallpaper within weeks. Rewrite the
text when you notice you have stopped reading it. Cost of exit is one swipe — this intervenes on
habit, not on intent.

**Undo:** Shortcuts → Automation → delete the automation.

### iOS 4 — The intent tax ★
**Mechanism:** friction + self-monitoring + user-defined goals. **Effort:** 10 min.

My favourite of these, because it produces something you can read later.

1. Create a note in **Notes** called `Phone log`.
2. **App Opened** automation for the app.
3. Actions:
   - **Ask for Input** — Text — prompt: *"What are you here for?"*
   - **Append to Note** — target the `Phone log` note, content: the **Provided Input** variable.
   - Optionally add **Current Date** so entries are timestamped.

Every open now costs one sentence, and after a week you have a document of your own reasons.
Read it. People report that the log is more affecting than any block, because the honest entries
("nothing", "bored", "avoiding the thing I said I'd do") are in their own handwriting.

**Weakness:** typing on every open is an active gesture, and active gestures lapse — see the
research on this. Treat it as a two-week diagnostic rather than a permanent arrangement.

**Undo:** Shortcuts → Automation → delete the automation. Keep the note; it is the useful part.

### iOS 5 — Delete the app, keep the service
**Mechanism:** access control. **Harm:** time displacement, exposure. **Effort:** 2 min.

Underrated and free. Delete the native app and use the site in Safari.

1. Delete the app.
2. Open the site in **Safari**. Do **not** "Add to Home Screen" — the point is that it is
   inconvenient.
3. Stay logged out if you can bear it. The login is the friction.

**Why this works:** the web version has no push notifications, worse infinite scroll, more
friction on every interaction, and no background presence. You keep access and lose the
affordances built to capture you.

**Bonus:** install a Safari **content blocker** from the App Store and you can hide specific
elements — the Reels row, the recommendations panel — on the web version. This is the only route
to element-level exposure reduction on iOS, and exposure is the harm with the fewest products
addressing it.

**Weakness:** nothing stops you reinstalling in thirty seconds, and some services degrade their
web version deliberately enough that you may lose something you actually valued. Decide which
features you will genuinely miss before deleting.

**Undo:** reinstall from the App Store; your account is unaffected.

### iOS 6 — Notification Summary, for interference
**Mechanism:** exposure limitation / interruption control. **Harm:** interference. **Effort:** 5
min.

The most neglected setting on the phone, and the right one if your problem is fragmentation
rather than total time.

1. **Settings** → **Notifications** → **Scheduled Summary** → on.
2. Set two or three delivery times a day. Fewer is better.
3. Add every app that is not a person contacting you directly.
4. While you are there: **Settings** → **Notifications** → per app → turn **Badges** off. The red
   dot is a pull with no information in it.

**Undo:** toggle Scheduled Summary off.

**Weakness:** it delivers on a schedule, so anything genuinely urgent from a non-allowed app
waits. Keep messages and calls out of the summary.

### iOS 7 — Screen Time with a passcode you don't hold
**Mechanism:** access control with a real cost of exit. **Effort:** 10 min.

The only iOS arrangement that resists your own intent.

1. **Settings** → **Screen Time** → **App Limits** → set limits per app or category.
2. Turn on **Block at End of Limit**.
3. **Settings** → **Screen Time** → **Lock Screen Time Settings** → set a passcode.
4. **Have someone else enter the passcode**, or generate a random one, write it on paper, and
   store it somewhere genuinely inconvenient.

**Read this before you do it.** This is the highest-commitment option here and it has a real
failure mode: needing an app during an emergency and being locked out. Use a paper backup rather
than another person if you travel alone. Test that you can recover before you rely on it.

**Undo:** requires the passcode — which is the point. Without it, a full device reset is the
only route, so **test recovery before you rely on this.**

### iOS 8 — Home screen hygiene
**Mechanism:** environmental friction. **Effort:** 5 min. **Cost:** nothing.

1. Remove the app from the Home Screen — long-press → **Remove from Home Screen** → keeps it in
   App Library.
2. Remove it from the Dock.
3. **Settings** → the app → **Siri & Search** → turn off **Show App in Search** and **Show on Home
   Screen**, so typing three letters doesn't surface it.

Now reaching it requires deliberate navigation rather than a thumb landing where it always lands.
This takes five minutes, costs nothing, and defeats a surprising share of automatic opens.

**Weakness:** it defeats the automatic reach and nothing more. Anyone who has decided to open
the app will find it in two seconds via search if you leave search enabled.

**Undo:** long-press in App Library → Add to Home Screen, and re-enable the Siri & Search toggles.

### iOS 9 — Boundary segmentation with Focus
**Mechanism:** segmentation. **Harm:** boundary blurring — the harm with almost no products.
**Effort:** 15 min.

1. **Settings** → **Focus** → create **Work** and **Personal**.
2. For each, set **Allowed Notifications** to an allow-list of people and apps — allow-list, not
   block-list.
3. Use **Focus Filters** inside each Focus to limit Mail accounts, Calendar sets, Safari tab
   groups, and Messages threads. This is the part almost nobody sets up, and it is what makes the
   segmentation real rather than cosmetic.
4. Give each Focus a **Schedule**, or add a **Shortcuts** automation triggered by arriving home or
   leaving work → **Set Focus**.

**If the pressure is coming from your employer rather than from you, this will not fix it.** No
setting on your phone resolves an expectation that you are reachable at 9pm. Worth naming
honestly before spending twenty minutes.

**Undo:** Settings → Focus → select the Focus → delete it, or just remove its schedule to keep
the setup dormant.

### iOS 10 — The charger automation
**Mechanism:** environmental, passive. **Harm:** time displacement, sleep. **Effort:** 3 min.

1. Shortcuts → **Automation** → **+** → **Charger** → **Is Connected** → **Run Immediately**,
   notifications off.
2. Actions: **Set Focus** → Sleep → On, and **Set Color Filters** → On.
3. Charge the phone in a different room. The automation is the reminder; the room is the
   intervention.

---

# Android

Android is more capable and more fragmented. **Check Samsung first if you have a Galaxy** — its
Modes and Routines is the best native automation on any phone, including iPhone, for this purpose.

**Weakness:** the automation fires on any charger, including in the car or at a desk, which is
usually fine but occasionally wrong. Add a **Wi-Fi network** condition if you want it to fire
only at home.

**Undo:** Shortcuts → Automation → delete the Charger automation.

## Samsung (Tier 1 — no new permissions)

**Modes and Routines** is pre-installed on One UI. Find it in Settings, or open the app directly.

### AND 1 — Grayscale when a named app opens ★
**Mechanism:** environmental friction. **Effort:** 5 min.

1. **Settings** → **Modes and Routines** → **Routines** tab → **+**.
2. Under **If**, tap **App opened** (it's under Event), select your apps, **Done**.
3. Under **Then**, tap **Display** → **Grayscale** → **On**.
4. Save. Samsung will offer to reverse the action when the condition ends — accept that, so colour
   returns when you leave the app.

**This is a native app-open trigger with no accessibility permission**, which makes Samsung the
one platform where the grayscale-on-app-open recipe is genuinely zero-cost. Say so to Samsung
users; most don't know they have it.

**Weakness:** cost of exit is one toggle in Modes and Routines. Habit, not intent.

**Undo:** Modes and Routines → Routines → select → delete, or toggle it off to keep the setup.

### AND 2 — Delayed grayscale, then close
**Mechanism:** escalating friction. **Effort:** 8 min.

Routines supports a delay and an app-close action, which lets you build escalation — the
principle the research recommends over repetition.

1. **If** → **App opened** → your app.
2. **Then** → add a **delay** (Samsung exposes this as a wait/after condition), then **Display** →
   **Grayscale** → **On**.
3. Optionally add a further delay and a **close app** action.

The first minutes are normal, then the colour drains, then it ends. This is closer to a
well-designed commercial product than most commercial products.

**Weakness:** the close-app action can interrupt something you were doing deliberately — a video
call in a social app, for instance. Set the delay generously the first week and tighten it once
you know your own pattern.

**Undo:** delete or disable the routine.

### AND 3 — Whole-context modes
1. **Modes** tab → pick or create a mode (Work, Sleep, Focus).
2. Set **Display** options including grayscale, and notification allow-lists.
3. Trigger by schedule, location, or Wi-Fi network.

**Weakness:** whole-context modes are blunt by design; if you find yourself turning the mode off
to do one thing, narrow its notification allow-list rather than abandoning it.

**Undo:** Modes tab → select the mode → turn off or delete.

## Pixel and stock Android (Tier 1)

### AND 4 — Modes with grayscale
**Effort:** 5 min.

Pixel **Modes** bundle display and notification changes behind one trigger. The Display section
includes **grayscale** and wallpaper dimming.

1. **Settings** → **Modes** → choose or create a mode.
2. Set **Display** → grayscale on, dim wallpaper on.
3. Set the trigger — schedule, location, or manual tile.

**Limitation to state plainly:** Pixel Modes **cannot trigger on an app opening.** Its triggers
are time, place and connectivity. For app-triggered grayscale on a Pixel you need Tier 2 below,
or you accept schedule-based grayscale instead — which, given that most people's problem hours are
predictable, is often enough.

**Undo:** Settings → Modes → select → turn off or delete.

### AND 5 — Bedtime mode
**Effort:** 3 min. **Settings** → **Digital Wellbeing** → **Bedtime mode**. Turns on grayscale
and silences notifications on a schedule. Zero configuration beyond the times. If someone wants
one thing, this is the one thing.

**Weakness:** it only covers the hours you set, so it does nothing about the afternoon. Pair it
with AND 6 if daytime is the problem.

**Undo:** Settings → Digital Wellbeing → Bedtime mode → off.

### AND 6 — Digital Wellbeing timers and Focus mode
**Effort:** 5 min.

1. **Settings** → **Digital Wellbeing** → **Dashboard** → set **app timers**. The app becomes
   unavailable for the rest of the day when the timer expires.
2. **Focus mode** pauses a chosen set of apps entirely, on a schedule or on demand.

**Weakness:** timers reset at midnight and can be extended in two taps. Habit, not intent.

**Undo:** Settings → Digital Wellbeing → Dashboard → remove the timer.

### AND 7 — Grayscale as a quick toggle
**Settings** → **Accessibility** → **Color and motion** → **Color correction** → **Grayscale**,
then add it to Quick Settings or assign it to the accessibility button. Manual, instant, and the
lowest-effort thing on this page.

**Weakness:** entirely manual, so it depends on you remembering at the moment you least want to.
Useful as a companion to an automated recipe rather than on its own.

**Undo:** turn the toggle off, or remove it from Quick Settings.

### AND 8 — Pause work apps ★
**Mechanism:** segmentation, with a real edge. **Harm:** boundary blurring. **Effort:** 10 min.

If your employer uses a **work profile**, Android gives you a single toggle that suspends every
work app and its notifications at once.

1. Find the **work profile** toggle in Quick Settings or in Settings → Accounts.
2. Schedule it if your launcher supports it, or pause it manually at a fixed time each evening.

**This is the strongest boundary tool on any phone** and it exists because enterprise policy
needed it, not because anyone designed it for wellbeing. If you don't have a work profile, the
manual equivalent is removing work accounts from the phone and using the browser.

**Weakness:** requires an employer-provisioned work profile — if your workplace does not use
one, this is unavailable and the manual substitute is removing work accounts from the phone
entirely.

**Undo:** toggle work apps back on. Nothing is lost; the apps were suspended, not removed.

### AND 9 — Firefox with uBlock Origin ★
**Mechanism:** exposure limitation, element level. **Harm:** exposure. **Effort:** 10 min.

**Android's genuine advantage over iOS.** Firefox for Android supports desktop-class extensions.

1. Install **Firefox** from the Play Store.
2. Install the **uBlock Origin** add-on inside Firefox.
3. Delete the native app for the service in question and use it in Firefox.
4. In uBlock's settings, add cosmetic filter rules for the specific surfaces you want gone — the
   Reels row, the Shorts shelf, the recommendations sidebar.

This is the only element-level exposure reduction available on a phone without writing code, and
exposure effects are the harm the product market has most neglected.

**Weakness:** filter rules break when sites change their markup. Keep a note of what each rule
targets so you can repair it.

**Undo:** remove the uBlock rules, or reinstall the native app. Firefox itself can stay.

## Tier 2 — MacroDroid or Tasker, Usage Access only

Use only if you need app-triggered automation and you are not on Samsung.

**The permission decision matters, so make it deliberately.** Both apps default their app-launch
trigger to the **Accessibility Service**, which can read and act on everything on your screen.
Both offer a legacy polling mode that uses **Usage Access** instead — which only reveals which app
is in the foreground.

**Choose the legacy mode.** In MacroDroid the setting is **Force legacy mode** for the
*Application Launched* trigger. It is less efficient and slightly less reliable. That is the
correct trade.

Recipes worth building: app launched → toggle grayscale; app launched → vibrate and show a dialog;
app launched → log to a file. Same patterns as the iOS recipes above.

**Do not grant Accessibility Service to an automation app** just to make a grayscale toggle more
reliable. The permission outlives the recipe, and the whole point of this exercise is not handing
your screen to software you cannot audit.

## Both platforms — network level

### NET 1 — DNS filtering
**Mechanism:** access control, whole-device, passive. **Effort:** 15 min, no code.

A private DNS profile blocks chosen domains across every app and browser, including ones with no
settings of their own.

- **Android:** Settings → **Network & internet** → **Private DNS** → point it at a configured
  NextDNS or similar hostname.
- **iOS:** install the provider's configuration profile.

**Disclose the trade:** a hosted resolver can see your DNS queries. Self-hosting (Pi-hole, AdGuard
Home) avoids that but requires running something at home. Either way this is the only recipe here
that covers a phone *and* a laptop with one change.

---

**Weakness:** blocks whole domains rather than parts of a page, so it cannot remove a Reels row
while leaving Instagram working. It also breaks in ways that look like a broken internet rather
than a working block, which can be confusing weeks later — keep a note of what you blocked.

**Undo:** Android: Settings → Network & internet → Private DNS → Off. iOS: delete the
configuration profile in Settings → General → VPN & Device Management.

## What none of this can do, and say so

- **It will not stop a determined decision.** Every Tier 1 recipe is a minute from off. That is by
  design — the interventions target the automatic reach.
- **iOS cannot block an app from another app.** Apple's Screen Time API is deliberately narrow.
  This constrains every third-party iOS tool on the market too, which is why they cluster around
  the same few mechanisms.
- **Nothing here changes what the apps do to you** — only your exposure to it. That limit is the
  argument for the other three modalities: regulation, platform design, and collective norms.
- **Nothing here is tested.** These recipes are assembled from mechanisms with varying evidence
  behind them. The pause has randomised support; grayscale has almost none, and is included
  because it is cheap, reversible and demands nothing at the moment of temptation. Try them as
  experiments on yourself and keep what survives two weeks.