eloff66 I am glad the installation went well for you. Disappointing that it didn't solve your problem but then it didn't entirely solve it for me either…
The first problem I had with smartphones was PWM flickering (Samsung J5) which gave me terrible eyestrain within a day of starting to use it. After discovering the evils of PWM I thought, OK, I just need a phone with a flicker free display but having acquired one, I was still getting eyestrain!
Months later, after wading through an ocean of irrelevant, useless advice on the internet about the supposed causes of smartphone eyestrain, I finally found a few hints that antialiasing might be the problem. Not being a software developer or Android modding expert it took me the best part of a year to figure out how to turn off the antialiasing in Android but, as already discussed, I did find a way so problem solved, right? Improved, but not solved! I was still getting some eyestrain after prolonged use.
After a bit more research I realised the problem was down to two other aspects of font rendering on smartphones:
Thin or light weight fonts. On all smartphones the designers have chosen to use fonts that are, in typographical language, 'light' which means the lines they are drawn with are very thin, almost hairline thin. These fonts seem to be hard on my eyes and cause eyetrain. To fix this I make all the text on my phones bold.
Grey text. For some reason, probably relating to how things look, software developers often choose to make text grey rather than black. Such text has lower contrast and is another cause of eyestrain. Android has a high contrast text mode which fixes this, at least in the Android system (unfortunately not all apps pay attention to this setting).
So to summarise, this is how I make smartphones usable for me:
- Avoid phones that use PWM to control the brightness of the display.
- Disable the antialiasing (as already discussed)
- Make all text bold (there is a setting for this in Android 12/13)
- Remove grey text by enabling Android's high contrast text mode.
As with disabling the antialiasing, the settings for 3 and 4 don't necessarily apply to all apps or to website text so additional solutions may be required there. This reply is already quite long so I won't post those solutions here. Post another reply if you want more info on that.