Smartphones And Digital Wellbeing

Smartphones And Digital Wellbeing – I’ll admit that when Google first announced Digital Wellbeing during Google I/O 2018, I cringed. Even though I write for a website dedicated to smartphones, I really don’t feel like I use my phone that much. I’m certainly not addicted to a smartphone (which isn’t even a real thing).

However, I have plenty of friends and family members who, in my opinion, use their phones too much. Any moment they’re not engaged in something, they’re looking at their phones – sometimes they’re looking at their phones while they’re engaged in something else right now!

Smartphones And Digital Wellbeing

While I’m a firm believer in the old saying of, “You make you,” it seems terribly unhealthy to be glued to your phone at every waking moment.

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Anyway, when Google announced Digital Wellbeing I thought to myself, “This is a great idea that will help a lot of people, but I don’t really have a use for it.”

I fall asleep around 11:00 p.m. every night, give or take 30 minutes. I’m almost always out of bed at 8:00 a.m. the next day, which takes me about nine hours of sleep (hey, getting a good night’s rest is healthy).

There are 24 hours in a day and I sleep for nine of them, which leaves me about 15 hours each day to live my life and do things.

On the first day I used Digital Wellbeing to track my phone usage over the whole day, I was on the device for three and a half hours.

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Doing the math, that means about 25 percent of my day was spent scrolling through Reddit, playing Potion Explosion, or reading an unhealthy amount of news.

Now, I don’t know about you, but that was quite an eye opener. Here I am acting all “holier-than-thou” about how much I don’t use my phone, and I literally waste a quarter of my day doing nothing.

If I waste a quarter of my day on my smartphone and I probably use my phone less than other people do, how much time are they wasting? I shudder to think of their Digital Wellbeing chart.

After the horror of discovering how much time I actually spend on my phone, I put Digital Wellbeing tools to work. The first thing I did was set up a schedule, which Google refers to as Wind Down. At 10:00 p.m., my phone’s display goes grayscale and my notifications are completely shut off.

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This sudden change doesn’t stop me from using my phone, but it’s a stark reminder that it’s 10:00 p.m. and it’s time to stop playing around.

The first time the screen went monochrome I was browsing Reddit. Although the text was still legible and elegant, the images were all black-and-white, which made them less interesting to look at. Immediately, I was less interested in being on Reddit.

Over the next few days, I began to anticipate Wind Down kicking into gear. I looked up at my clock and saw 10:00 p.m. fast approaching and knew it would be time to stop doing phone stuff, so I’d better get whatever I needed as soon as possible.

I also set Reddit’s timer to turn off after 30 minutes of in-app time. I don’t need to be on Reddit for more than 30 minutes a day, so I figured it was a good time limit.

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In about three days, I increased my screen time from 3.5 hours to an hour. An hour out of 15 is about 7 percent of my day, which is a much more reasonable amount.

Instead of scrolling through my phone in bed before falling asleep, now I read a book. Instead of lying on the couch browsing Reddit after work, I played guitar.

It turns out, a little subtle reminder that I’ve been on my phone too much was all I needed to get my butt in gear.

Granted, some of the things I’ve done have been “screen” things. For example, I’ve put down my phone and instead picked up a video game controller a few times. I have also taken out my laptop and written things rather than reading the news on my smartphone. So it’s not like I’m rejecting all technology, I’m just spending less time wandering around on a smartphone accomplishing… well… nothing.

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Unfortunately, Digital Wellbeing is currently only available on Android 9.0 Pie, and even then it’s in beta and you have to register to use it. But if you’re lucky enough to have a Pie, I strongly encourage you to give Digital Wellness a shot. If you’re not on Pie, make sure you pay attention to Digital Wellness when you finally get it. How do Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing stack up? / Two similar but slightly different views on managing our time on our phones

The developer conference season ends with Apple’s WWDC this week, and the main takeaway is that between Google’s “Digital Wellbeing” and Apple’s “Screen Time,” the two biggest smartphone developers are taking some time to curb smartphone overuse .

On the surface, both companies use very similar methods with the tools they offer to present information to users. Apple and Google are both adding new dashboards, with options for more detailed views of how you spend your time, along with more granular views of how often you use individual apps – down to the minute . There’s data on how many notifications you’ve received, where they’re from, and breakdowns of when you’re actually on your phone.

The biggest addition is the opportunity to set self-set time limits for apps on your phone. This is where the main difference between the two methods lies.

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Apple is relatively lax about how strict it takes its limits. It offers users the option to ignore the pop-up and continue using the app. (Although the company said it will continue to remind you that you’ve gone over your daily limit.) Apple may be giving you the information and the opportunity to put your phone down, but it’s up to you it’s still up to you whether you want to do that or not. listen

Google, on the other hand, seems to be much more aggressive in enforcing its limits – at least in the initial developer beta. It goes as far as coloring the app icon on your home screen, and won’t let you “unpause” the app unless you go back to the app dashboard and remove the limit manually . It’s still early, so we’ll have to see if Apple’s more laissez-faire or tougher strategy is more effective.

Apple also wants to push consumers to think about how they make their choices. The company will actively present weekly reports to users (ironically, through notifications), while Google will offer the information through the dashboard, but users will have to search for it themselves.

Apple also goes one step further than Google when it comes to parental controls. While Google’s dashboard and usage limits seem designed primarily for users to limit their own behavior, Apple will let parents control their child’s usage remotely from their own devices.

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Apple’s parental control options are actually stricter than what users seem to be able to implement for themselves as adults. App limits via parental controls have the option to be set as hard limits, so kids will be forced to, say, stop playing

Completely, or they will have to ask a parent for extra time to continue playing. Google offers a separate app called Family Link that can do many of the same time-monitoring and app-blocking tricks, but it’s a separate app that parents have to go out of their way to w installed and enabled, not something built into the OS.

Google and Apple are both updating their Do Not Disturb and notification features to put more options back in the hands of users as well. Apple is finally taking a page from Google’s book by grouping notifications, and both operating systems will now offer users suggestions directly from the pop-up menu to manage notifications per app.

While Apple is expanding the scope of Do Not Disturb to include location- or event-based triggers (like reminder notifications while you’re at a museum or at your friend’s party), Google is making its version more powerful. DND mode will completely hide all notifications until you turn it off.

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Overall, one could probably say that Google takes a bit more of a brute force approach with its Digital Wellbeing program, while Apple’s approach is a bit more oriented towards just supplying the user with information like that they can make better decisions themselves (if they choose). Both are beta pieces of software, so there’s a real chance Apple and Google can make huge changes to how these features work by the time they’re released in the fall.

At the end of the day, Apple and Google are taking some real, thoughtful steps here when it comes to giving users information about how they use their phones. And yes, there are certainly cynics who might feel that Apple and Google’s efforts are disingenuous – after all, these companies have wanted

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