How do I Desaturate or greyscale WITHOUT using a filter

I am developing an application for iPhone retina display and need to be able to desaturate images.

Now, everything I have ever seen says to use the color matrix filter… and this does work on the pc… however, because I am deploying on the iPhone - filters - ALL FILTERS, are not supported… and therefor do nothing.

Is there a way I can turn a color bitmapData into a greyscale image without having to use a colormatrix filter, or any other filter?