Apple targets tech addiction
“Apple is trying to make us love our iPhones a little less,” said and Hayley Tsukayama in The Washington Post. At the tech giant’s annual developers’ conference last week, an event that is typically used to unveil new devices and cutting-edge software, Apple announced that its next version of the iPhone’s operating system would feature new controls to help people curb the amount of time they spend on the devices. Screen Time, a new app due in September, calculates how many times you check your device daily and the time you spend on individual apps, and offers an option to set daily usage limits. There are also new controls to allow parents to remotely track and limit their children’s device use. Last month, Google announced a similar suite of Android tools, including warnings if you’ve been watching YouTube for too long, said Tripp Mickle in The Wall Street Journal. With Americans now spending 3.3 hours a day staring at their mobile devices—an hour’s increase from five years ago—even Silicon Valley giants are apparently worried that we are “not being present enough in the everyday world.”
Apple’s new app is its first “quiet acknowledgement that internet and smartphone addiction is real,” said Tanya Basu in TheDailyBeast.com. Psychologists have argued for years that internet-addicted patients have a “detrimental, compulsive need” to be on the web that “affects the same areas of the brain” as in people addicted to gambling, alcohol, and overeating. Users the world over have anecdotally noted increases in anxiety, depression, and insomnia as we spend more time on our devices, and researchers have found “a clear correlation between teen smartphone use and anxiety, depression, and suicide rates.” There’s more than a little irony here, said Sam Wolfson in The Guardian. Even as tech companies recognize “that the amount we’re staring at screens is making us miserable, they still believe it’s their products that can fix the problem.”
How well do Apple and Google’s new apps stack up? asked Chaim Gartenberg in TheVerge.com. Both have added new dashboards and information on how often you’re using individual apps—“down to the minute.” The two split in their approach to time limits for apps. Apple’s is “relatively loose,” allowing you to simply click ‘ignore’ on the pop-up warning and continue using the app if you choose. Google is “more aggressive” in its enforcement of limits. When your allotted daily time is up, the app goes dark and you must manually alter the limit in the dashboard to unpause it. It remains to be seen which approach is more effective. But this is “the beginning of a conversation that seems long overdue.”