Manage Your Smartphone Addiction With Experimental Google Apps
Android: Google Creative Lab has released six new experimental apps designed with one goal in mind – to get you to stop obsessing over every notification, check every social network, and typically glue your phone to your face (or hand) for most of the day.
While all six apps are interesting and I’ll cover all of them, there are three apps that I find more compelling than the rest. If I were trying to curb my smartphone addiction – which I don’t because it’s a Sisyphean task – here’s what I would first check:
To transform
What I love about Morph is how it transforms your home screen and launcher into a productivity experiment. Instead of using the default Google home screen and launcher that you’re probably used to seeing on your device (assuming you’re using a Pixel like me), you get the ability to customize different home screens and launchers for different, larger tasks. …
For example, with Morph you can select different “modes” such as “Work”, “Home” and “Gym” – whatever you need. In each mode, you choose several applications that you want to have access to for what you do. They appear on your home screen, and as an added bonus, all notifications from apps that are not items of your choice are blocked.
If you don’t want to manually switch the modes, you can set the Morph modes to specific times, or better yet, to places – in other words, the gym mode can be turned on whenever you are in the gym and all you need is a mess. is the music you want to play during your climb (or whatever you do to distract yourself). However, switching between modes is as easy as swiping up and down, so you can use manual mode as well.
Unlock watch
This is not an app, but rather a wallpaper. Install Unlock Clock on your device and set it as wallpaper as if you were taking a new image by scrolling to find it in the Live Wallpaper category on the wallpaper selection screen. The principle is very simple: you see a large number in the center of the screen. Each time you unlock your phone, the number increases. And as far as I know, this number is reset every day.
Meaning? You can see how many times you’ve used your device – actually used your device – with a rough estimate of how many times you’ve unlocked it. Once you start typing three-digit numbers, it might be time to put your smartphone aside and be distracted by some other hobby or interest.
And, yes, the name Unlock Clock is a bit wrong. This is not a clock, but a counter. Hope you can forgive Google for cheating.
Mailbox
If you want a kernel option to manage a lot of your notifications, consider inbox . Sure, Android 10 gives you several options to reduce the number of requests and updates you get on your device, but Post Box is a great alternative if you really want to get out of trouble.
Install the app and you can choose from four delivery options: one, two, three or four times a day. This is, of course, for a batch of notifications that the Post Box will keep in the background. In the future, you will not receive any notification, except for the flood, which arrives at any delivery time that you set in the application.
And it’s all. You can check this in the app to see when your next delivery will be, but you won’t be able to receive any notifications until the time is right. Cruel? Yes. Is it effective? Absolutely.
Everything else launched by Google Creative Lab
I find the above three apps to be the most effective in fighting smartphone addiction. However, there are three more worth checking out, as noted by Android Police . (I just didn’t fall in love with them as much as others.)
- Desert Island : you choose several apps you want to use throughout the day, and that’s all you have! You can actually access more apps if you don’t mind digging around in the app a bit, but this is at least one way (hopefully) to start limiting how much you rely on your smartphone for everything.
- We Flip : Install this app with your friends and it will track how long you’ve all resisted the urge to grab your phones and do something.
- Paper phone : You pick the information you need at the start of the day — for example, meeting times, contacts for a call, or a map — and then you can physically print all the information you need on a piece of paper. Who then needs a smartphone?