TrueTo for Sensory Sensitivity

Android settings for sensory sensitivity

9 settings across 3 apps that reduce visual, motion, and sensory intensity. Your phone ships with every sensory channel at maximum. There's no single place to turn them down. TrueTo flips Remove Animations and Spotify Canvas in one tap today; one-tap automation for the rest of this profile is rolling out.

Your phone is bright, loud, vibrating, and moving — all at once, all the time. Every notification is an unexpected sound. Every app switch plays an animation. Every scroll triggers auto-playing video. Every keypress buzzes.

There are settings for each of these. They're in different menus across the OS and every app you've installed. Brightness is in Display, vibration is in Sound, animations are in Accessibility and Developer Options, autoplay is per-app. There's no central control. TrueTo's verified catalog covers 9 of these settings, automation for them is rolling out, and every one is listed below with its exact path.

Which three settings make the biggest difference?

  • Remove Animations — strips every sliding, fading, and zooming transition. The phone becomes predictable: what you tap is what you see.
  • Dark theme + Extra Dim — less total light output, and a brightness floor below the slider's minimum. Together, the lowest-intensity screen available.
  • Canvas off (Spotify) — stops the looping video behind every song. The switch is inside Spotify, under Content and display, not in Android's settings.

Turning on Remove Animations and toggling Canvas off takes 9 taps across Spotify and an OS menu nobody finds. TrueTo does both in one. Dark theme and Extra Dim add 6 more by hand; automation for those is rolling out.

Every setting TrueTo applies is individually reversible. Feeling fine? One tap puts them back.

Get TrueTo on Google Play

No ads · No third-party tracking · Account optional

What's in your sensory profile?

9 settings across 3 apps in TrueTo's verified catalog, with the exact path for each; one-tap automation for this profile is rolling out. A few extra settings are listed below and marked Manual: not in the catalog yet, but the path is accurate, so you can apply them yourself. Each includes why it matters for sensory sensitivity specifically.

Dimensions: V Visual · A Auditory · M Motion · H Haptic

Android System

  • Remove Animations M

    Every app switch, menu open, and screen transition plays a sliding or fading animation. Each one is a visual event your brain has to process. Removing them makes the phone predictable — what you tap is instantly what you see, with nothing in between. Remove Animations: the motion toggle in Accessibility ↗

  • Window / Transition / Animator Duration scales M Manual

    If Remove Animations feels too abrupt — screens snapping with no transition at all — Developer Options lets you slow animations to half-speed instead. Slower is more predictable than absent. Developer Options: fine-tuning animation speed ↗

  • Extra Dim V

    The brightness slider has a minimum that's still too bright in low-light environments. Extra Dim goes below that floor. If overhead lighting is already overwhelming, the phone shouldn't add to it. Extra Dim: the brightness setting below the brightness slider ↗

  • Night Light V

    Blue-dominant light is more visually intense than warm amber. Night Light shifts the color temperature of the entire screen. For persistent light sensitivity, set it to always-on rather than sunset-only. Night Light: the blue-light filter hidden in Display ↗

  • Reduce Bright Colors V Manual

    Saturated colors at close range are high-intensity visual input. This dials back vibrancy across the entire screen without switching to grayscale. The phone still looks normal — it just stops being loud. Reduce Bright Colors: taming screen vibrancy ↗

  • Color correction V

    Built as a color filter for color vision, but its Grayscale mode is the strongest color control on the phone: every app renders in gray. Pick the mode once in that menu; after that, a single toggle turns the whole filter on and off. Reduce Bright Colors turns color down — this turns it off entirely.

  • Dark theme V

    White backgrounds are the brightest element on any screen. Dark theme inverts this. Less total light output means less visual processing load. Combined with Extra Dim, it's the lowest-intensity screen configuration available.

  • Do Not Disturb A Manual

    Every notification is an unexpected sensory event — a sound, a vibration, or both. DND silences all of them on your schedule. Starred contacts still break through when it matters.

  • Flash notifications V

    An option that flashes the camera light for calls and notifications. If it's on, every alert is a burst of bright light on top of the sound and the vibration. Off keeps alerts to the channels you've already decided to allow.

  • Touch sounds / Vibrate on tap H Manual

    Every keypress, toggle, and button tap produces a small vibration or click sound by default. Individually each is minor. Cumulatively across a day of phone use, it's hundreds of tiny sensory events you didn't ask for.

  • Notification sounds per app A Manual

    By default every app uses the same notification tone. You can't tell Instagram from Gmail without looking. Customizing lets you decide which apps are worth the auditory interrupt — and which should be silent entirely.

  • Mono audio A

    Stereo places sounds in one ear or the other, and apps use that constantly: a notification pans left, a game effect jumps right. Mono audio plays the same signal in both ears. Sound becomes one predictable stream instead of something that moves around your head.

Spotify

  • counterintuitive: Canvas M

    A looping four-second video behind every song. You opened Spotify for audio. Canvas adds constant visual motion to a screen you weren't watching — and it cycles endlessly. The toggle is inside Spotify, under Content and display, filed nowhere near Accessibility. Spotify Canvas: the looping video you didn't ask for ↗

YouTube

  • counterintuitive: Autoplay next video V+A Manual

    When a video ends, the screen goes quiet for a moment — then a new video starts without warning. New visuals, new audio, new content. Autoplay off means the phone does nothing until you make a choice. Google documents this path; confirm it on your device. Not yet in TrueTo's automated catalog: you flip it yourself.

  • Playback in feeds M Manual

    Videos auto-play as you scroll past them. You're scanning titles. The feed is adding motion you didn't expect. With this off, nothing plays until you tap it. YouTube dropped "Muted" from the label; the behavior is the same. The catalog check that targets this row still looks for the old name, so it can't match the new one yet.

Netflix

Instagram

  • Data Saver M Manual

    Without this, videos pre-load and auto-play as you scroll. Each one is unexpected motion on a screen you're trying to read. Data Saver means videos wait for a deliberate tap — you choose when the screen moves.

  • Quiet Mode A Manual

    Instagram's notifications are unpredictable in timing, frequency, and type: likes, comments, stories, lives, suggestions. Quiet Mode lets you define when the app is allowed to interrupt you and when it isn't.

Chrome

  • Preload pages V Manual

    Preloading makes page transitions instantaneous — new content appears with no warning and no loading indicator. That's an unpredictable visual change. A brief loading pause is predictable; an instant content swap is not.

  • Discover / news feed V Manual

    You opened a browser tab for one purpose. The feed is images, video thumbnails, and headlines you didn't request — dense, varied visual input. Hiding it gives you a search bar and nothing else.

TikTok

  • counterintuitive: Data Saver V+M

    TikTok's default is full-screen auto-playing video with audio, and there's no setting actually labeled "Autoplay." Data Saver is the closest thing, but it doesn't gate playback to Wi-Fi. Turned on, it lowers video quality and cuts background data use, so there's less visual detail and less processing demand. It doesn't stop the For You feed from advancing while you're scrolling it.

Counterintuitive — seems harmless to leave on; for sensory sensitivity it adds unnecessary input.

Manual Not yet in TrueTo's supported catalog. The path is accurate; you make the change yourself.

Common questions

Why is my phone so overwhelming?

Your phone ships with every sensory channel set to maximum: full brightness, full color saturation, all sounds on, all vibrations on, all animations on, all videos auto-playing. Each is an independent setting in a different menu. There's no central place to turn them all down. The default configuration assumes everyone processes sensory input the same way.

What's the difference between Remove Animations and Developer Options?

Remove Animations is all-or-nothing — it eliminates every sliding and fading transition. Developer Options has three speed sliders (Window, Transition, Animator) that let you slow animations to half-speed instead. Slower animations are more predictable than absent ones. Try 0.5× first; switch to Remove Animations if you need less.

Can I turn off vibration for everything?

Nearly everything. Touch sounds and vibrate-on-tap are in Settings → Sound & vibration → Vibration and haptics. Keyboard vibration has its own toggle in your keyboard app's settings. Notification vibration can be turned off per app or globally through Do Not Disturb. The phone has at least four independent vibration settings because no one at any point put them in one place.

Will these settings make my phone harder to use?

No. Every setting reduces unnecessary sensory output — animations, auto-playing media, unsolicited sounds and vibrations. Nothing is removed that you can't deliberately trigger when you want it. Your phone does less by default, but everything still works when you choose to use it.

Can I change these settings depending on how I feel?

Manually, you'd have to visit every setting individually — some in the OS, some in each app. That's dozens of menus across multiple apps. For the settings TrueTo automates, one tap applies the configuration and one tap reverses it, so your phone can match how you feel right now without requiring you to navigate the settings that are causing the overload. A few settings below are marked "Manual": the path is accurate, but TrueTo doesn't automate that one yet.

One tap to apply, one tap to reverse — rolling out across this profile now.

Get TrueTo on Google Play

No ads · No third-party tracking · Account optional

Your phone has settings for all of this. They're just in twenty different places. TrueTo puts them in one.