Apple has unveiled digital wellbeing tools to help people reduce the time they spend glued to their screens. A new app called Screen Time will offer iPhone and iPad users a dashboard highlighting how much time they have spent using which apps, how many notifications they receive, how often they pick up their device and how their usage patterns compare to the average. The app also lets users set daily time limits for individual apps, and a notification will be shown when the time limit is about to expire. Parents will be able to access their children’s activity reports from their own devices to understand and manage their browsing habits. “Some apps send us flurries of notifications trying to draw us in for fear of missing out,” said Apple’s senior vice-president of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi, speaking to a 6,000-strong audience at WWDC, Apple’s annual developer conference, at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose on Monday. “For some of us it’s become such a habit we don’t even recognise just how distracted we’ve become.” Screen Time will be available with iOS 12, the latest version of Apple’s mobile operating system, which launches later this year. Other digital wellbeing features to launch with iOS 12 include enhancements to the “do not disturb” feature, including a bedtime mode that dims the display and hides all notifications from the lock screen until prompted in the morning. The new operating system will also let users control how notifications are delivered to reduce interruptions, including the ability to group together notifications or turn them off completely. Apple’s virtual assistant Siri will also make suggestions for notification settings based on which alerts people act upon. The focus on digital wellbeing comes at a time when technology companies including Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple are being scrutinised for their use of habit-forming design practices that encourage people to spend more time on their devices, such as infinite scrolling, notifications and other behavioural “nudges”. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice-president of software engineering, describes ‘Screen Time’. Photograph: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP Apple’s tools are very similar to those announced by Google last month at its own annual developer conference, Google I/O. The latest version of Google’s mobile operating system, Android P, also comes with an “app dashboard” which allows users to set time limits on individual apps as well as a wind-down mode before bedtime that stops notifications and turns the screen to greyscale. The company also doubled down on its commitment to privacy with the introduction of tools to prevent advertisers from tracking users of Apple devices from being tracked online. In a direct swipe at Facebook, Federighi explained how “like buttons and share buttons” and comment features can “be used to track you whether you click on them or not”. “This year we’re shutting that down,” he said, adding that people can interact with these features if they choose to, but they won’t be tracked by default on an Apple computer if they use the native Safari browser on the next version of its desktop operating system, macOS Mojave. The company is also clamping down on a technique called “fingerprinting” which allows advertisers to identify and track individual web users based on the unique way their computer is set up, including the device, operating system and fonts they are using. “Mass deployment of fingerprinting protection is a game-changer for privacy engineering, and for users,” said Dr Lukasz Olejnik, independent security and privacy researcher and consultant. This builds on Apple’s efforts announced in 2017 to restrict web cookies, which also allow advertising companies to track users across the internet. “Put simply, there are two big classes of tracking: cookies and fingerprinting,” added Olejnik. “It appears that Apple has set a goal to go after all techniques that may be used in third-party tracking. It’s an arms race and I believe Apple may be winning.”<doc-sep>Parents, worried their iPhone-carrying kids are addicted to their screens, likely rejoiced when iOS 12 was announced with a new feature that monitors screen time and allows users to set time limits. Childless yet eager to test the feature, New York Times tech reporter Brian X. Chen borrowed a kid from an editor for a near-month-long test run of Screen Time – and it worked. Chen chronicled 14-year-old Sophie’s experience – and sometimes desperate response to being cut off – in today’s New York Times. Sophie, who Chen described as a “screenager,” was the ideal subject for the story and the type of user at the heart of a global debate over obsessive digital consumption. Tim Cook fessed up during WWDC’s keynote earlier this year that Apple devices, the iPhone in particular, can be addictive so the tech company felt compelled to offer a solution. Screen Time provides a dashboard that charts daily or weekly usage of your iPhone and how much time you spend each of your apps. The user can set time limits and lockouts for some of the more time-sucking apps or categories of apps, like social media. A beta version of iOS 12 is available now with widespread release coming this fall. Chen loaned the girl an iPhone X for the experiment. Sophie managed to curtail her use of SnapChat, but as Chen wrote, being locked out of it after an hour left her “initially incensed.” During Week 2, when she was trying to withdraw from her phone, strange things started happening to Sophie. After the screenager first used up all her time on Snapchat on a Tuesday, she told her mother that she felt “triggered” (which I would learn is slang for feeling annoyed or incensed). She later told me that she had realized she would open her phone and just stare blankly at the app icons to avoid using up her limit on Snapchat. “It was just a pattern for me — to open my phone and I would have nowhere to go,” she said. “I was just looking at a screen. It was kind of weird, so I’m trying not to do that.” But in the end, the results were satisfying. Sophie’s average daily phone use plummeted by about half, from over six hours during Week 1 to about three hours and four minutes during Week 3. Chen, recognizing his own problem with screen time, set his own limits and felt competitive with Sophie, especially when she had more success decreasing her dependency. She even requested more limits as the days went on. Sophie was succinct summing up her experience: “It’s annoying having my phone but not being able to use it. I think it increases my good habits, though.” Read Chen’s story in today’s online edition of theNew York Times<doc-sep>Apple has become the latest tech giant to prioritize digital wellbeing. At its Worldwide Developer Conference this morning, Apple announced a series of new controls that will allow iOS users to monitor how much time they spend on devices, set time limits on app usage, control the distraction of notifications, and control the device usage for their children. The addition of these features was previously leaked by Bloomberg, but the details on how they worked wasn’t yet known. In the upcoming version of the iOS 12 software for iPhone and iPad, Apple will include a series of features focused on digital wellness, starting with an upgraded Do Not Disturb feature that will help people who tend to look at their iPhone at night, and then find themselves distracted by the excessive notifications. With Do Not Disturb during bedtime, you can configure so your iPhone doesn’t show your notifications when you look at your phone at night, during hours you customize. The feature will also help you at other times of the day, too – for example, if you don’t want to be interrupted during class or a meeting. In addition, this feature will include a new morning wakeup screen, that’s similarly bare of notifications so you are “gently eased into your day.” In Control Center, you can configure when Do Not Disturb will end, as well. Meanwhile, Apple is also introducing better ways to manage your notifications. Siri will even suggest to you which notifications you should turn off, based on which apps it knows you’re no longer using. Siri can also prompt you to turn notifications off entirely or just delivery them quietly. But even more useful, perhaps, is support for grouped notifications. That means notifications will not just be grouped by app, but also by topic and thread. You can tap into these groups and look at those from a particular app, and you can triage all those grouped notifications with a single swipe. Another part of Apple’s digital wellbeing features includes reporting over how you spend time on your device. This involves a weekly activity summary that shows you how you used your iPhone or iPad during the week. This full activity report will show you how much time your spending on your device and in apps, and how that breaks down per day. You can also see which apps are sending you the most notifications, so you can make better decisions about which apps’ notifications you may want to disable. And another feature lets you set time limits for apps that take up your idle time, which you’d like to be more thoughtful about, in terms of your usage. When your time is about up, you’ll get an alert, and when the time is up, a new “Times Up” screen comes up. You can extend your time, if need be, Apple notes, but you’ll still get nudges to take a break. Other new features are aimed at families who want to control screen time for their children. This includes an activity report for parents about their kids’ device and app usage, and the option of creating allowances for kids. A “Downtime” option will help kids to unplug, and parents can limit app usage by category or individual whitelisted apps. That way, parents can make sure critical apps will still work even during downtime, like the Phone app or Books. However, during Downtime, notifications from apps aren’t displayed, and a badge appears on apps so kids know they can’t currently be used. A Screen Time limit lets parents block off time when the device can’t be used at all, like around bedtime. This feature works with Family Sharing. All this is configured by parents remotely from their own device, says Apple. Apple is not the first tech company to rethink its responsibilities around device addiction. At Google’s developer conference just a month ago, the company introduced its own set of time management tools for Android users. Its tools help users track screen time and app usage, and include new features like a “shush” mode which turns on Do Not Disturb by flipping the phone over, and a “wind down,” color reduction mode for bedtime. In addition, other major tech companies have begun to consider digital wellbeing when updating their products. For example, Facebook earlier in 2018 changed how its News Feed operates to reduce users’ time spent on the site in favor of wellbeing. And Facebook-owned Instagram just introduced its first time well spent feature, by informing users “you’re all caught up” when they’ve viewed all the new posts. The idea is that people don’t know when to stop when in comes to devices and apps, and lack information and tools that can help them make decisions about how much time they want to spend on devices, versus how much time they’re actually spending. The movement around digital wellbeing is a fairly recent shift for Silicon Valley, where companies until now have encouraged the design of software and apps that continually engage and addict users, without considering the psychological cost. Stress, anxiety, insomnia, distracted thoughts, inability to concentrate, emotional issues and more have been the result of these companies’ desire to keep users glued to their devices. But now some early tech execs are pushing back. Former Facebook president Sean Parker has openly worried about what social media was doing to kids’ brains and admitted Facebook was designed to exploit weakness in the human psyche to addict users. A former Google exec Tristan Harris launched a coalition of technologists and activists called the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to encourage the implementation of new design principles that help to put users back in control of their technology usage. As the rumblings around digital addiction escalate, other trends are emerging as well – like the booming business for “mindfulness” apps and those that help users practice self-care, which includes putting the phone down and taking care of our other needs. Some have put this into practice in an extreme way, as of late – Simon Cowell said he actually gave up his mobile phone entirely, and feels so much happier as a result. With its own new tools, Apple has the ability to set a new tone for the industry as a whole, given how others copy its designs – right down to the iPhone X notch. But in this case, mimicry would be a good thing. The creation of a new culture around technology usage which stops measuring “time spent” and repeat sessions as metrics of success, would be something that ultimately benefits everyone.<doc-sep>
While Apple's Screen Time is yet to reach the masses, the feature is a part of the iOS 12 betas, and is now reported to have already helped a teenager drop her iPhone usage by almost half within three weeks. The ultimate aim of Screen Time is to help iPhone and iPad users understand their usage patterns and eventually limit the time they spend on screens. Similar to Apple, Google also brought an initiative called Digital Wellbeing earlier this year that will be available across all its platforms, including Android, to help users curb device addiction. "Screen Time empowers you with both insight and control over how you spend your time, and it starts with reports," explained Craig Federighi, SVP of Software Engineering, Apple, at WWDC 2018, while announcing Screen Time. The feature offers a weekly activity summary and breaks down the data show how much time you're spending on your device and what apps you're using the most during the day or night, as well as how often you're simply picking up your phone on an hourly basis. All this helped Sophie, 14, who was volunteered for a real-life Screen Time test by The New York Times' Brian X. Chen. During the course of three weeks, it was initially found that like hundreds and thousands of other teens, Sophie was largely using Snapchat on her iPhone X. When she had used up her allotted time on the Snapchat app, she felt incensed and started staring blankly at the app icons on the iPhone to avoid using up her limit on the app. "It was just a pattern for me - to open my phone and would have nowhere to go," the teenager said, as quoted by The New York Times. "I was just looking at a screen. It was kind of weird, so I'm trying not to do that." Ultimately, Chen reported that Sophie's average daily usage of her iPhone reduced by about half - from over six hours during the first week of the testing to nearly three hours and four minutes during the third week. This evidently shows how the addition of Screen Time could help users reduce their screen times and curb addiction to their devices. However, in addition to the software showing data to put a limit on the usage, there is a need for adopting habits to use mobile devices only when they are needed. We're yet to see the mass level change through developments such as Screen Time and Google's Digital Wellbeing. Nevertheless, Sophie's example gives us the hope that technology will help us save from the adverse effects of technology. Of course, to be noted is that this is just one example, and the experience millions of users will have may well show different results. To begin your journey with Screen Time, you need to download the latest iOS 12 beta on your iPhone or iPad. It is, however, recommended to wait for the public release of the new iOS version that will debut sometime in September.