The amount of time you spend on your smartphone is highly determined by what you do during that time. It could be monitoring your business, making calls, browsing the internet, texting your friends over social media apps, or entertaining yourself through games and videos. Whatever you do with your smartphone, as long as you do it beyond normal measure, it becomes an addiction.
This could be the primary motive of Google coming up with its Digital wellbeing mechanism. These are the basic tools to guide you on basic monitoring of how much time you spend using your phone.
Much as this does not have any control on how and when you use your smartphone, it shows – in detail – just how long you use particular apps, how many unlocks you perform in a day, and the number of notifications received in a day.
It is through these stats that Google wants to tune your phone usage into what’s more productive for you.
Actually, it is now mandatory for all Android phones to come pre-installed with a “digital wellbeing” app. The company has already launched six experimental digital wellbeing apps that can implement this mechanism.
Digital Wellbeing Apps by Google
- Unlock Clock, a live wallpaper that displays the number of times you have unlocked your phone. In this, Google hopes that whenever you see the numbers displayed, and they are probably outrageous, you could rethink your smartphone activity and give your device a rest.
- We Flip, a ‘game kind-of’ app that can detect another of its kind using Nearby permission. The first person to flip the phone up to view a notification loses, and the whole session ends.
- Post Box, which collects all your notifications then delivers them during specific scheduled times. Take it as a form of “focus mode” app for Android.
- Desert Island, which lets you choose a maximum of 5 MUST use apps then hides the rest.
- Morph , which allows you to create different modes of your phone like work, weekend, etc. with different apps available. So, it can switch between these modes automatically depending on the time of the day or your location.
- Paper Phone, which enables you to print all the critical information that you have to attend during the day so that you avoid checking your phone.
