Phones to help us unplug

IT’S not Apple’s fault you feel enslaved by your phone. But the company that gave the world the modern smartphone has an opportunity this year to create a brave and groundbreaking new take on that device: a phone that encourages you to use it more thoughtfully, more deliberately – and a lot less.

Tech “addiction” is a topic of rising national concern. I put the A-word in quotes because the pull our phones exert over us isn’t the same as that of drugs or alcohol. But a parade of tech luminaries, including several former Facebook employees, have argued that we’re no match for the sophisticated machinery of engagement and persuasion being built into smartphone apps.

Facebook has said it’s willing to lose money to improve its users’ well-being – but I’m sceptical they’ll be able to suppress their economic interests. Government regulation and more restraint from users might also help, but the former is unlikely and the latter is insufficient.

So who’s left? The same company that always seems to turn up when it’s time to cross into a new era of technology: Apple.

I got to thinking about Apple’s responsibility last week when two large investors wrote an open letter asking the company to do more about its products’ effects on children. I was initially inclined to dismiss the letter as a publicity stunt; if you’re worried about children and tech, why not go after Facebook?

But when I called several experts, I found they agreed with the investors. Sure, they said, Apple isn’t responsible for the excesses of the digital ad business, but it does have a moral responsibility to – and a business interest in – the well-being of its customers.“I do think this is their time to step up,” said Tristan Harris, a former design ethicist at Google who now runs Time Well Spent, an organisation working to improve technology’s impact on society. “In fact,” Harris added, “they may be our only hope.”

Harris suggested several ideas for Apple to make a less-addictive smartphone. For starters, Apple could give people a lot more feedback about how they’re using their devices.

Imagine if, once a week, your phone gave you a report on how you spent your time, similar to how your activity tracker tells you how sedentary you were last week.

It could also needle you: “Farhad, you spent half your week scrolling through Twitter. Do you really feel proud of that?” It could offer to help: “If I notice you spending too much time on Snapchat next week, would you like me to remind you?”

Another idea is to let you impose more fine-grained controls over notifications. Harris suggested that Apple could re- quire apps to assign a kind of priority level to their notifications. “Let’s say you had three notification levels – heavy users, regular users and lite, or Zen,” Harris said.

There’s a danger that some of these anti-addiction efforts could get too intrusive. But that’s also why Apple would shine here; building a lessaddictive phone is chiefly a problem of interface design, which is basically Apple’s entire corporate raison d’être.

Apple released a statement last week saying that it had a few features on addiction in the works. Apple hardly ever talks about future products, so it declined to elaborate on any of its ideas when I called. Let’s hope it’s working on something grand.