Instead, when you tap it, a pop-up appears telling you that you’ve hit your limit, and the pop-up doesn’t have an option to “unpause.” To do that, you have to go through the work of heading back to the dashboard app. And when you’ve reached your self-imposed limit, the app is “paused.” It amounts to parental controls (which already exist for Android), but for you instead of your child.Ī paused app has a grayscale icon on your home screen and it flat-out won’t open in Android P. When you get close to the end, a notification pops up warning you that you’re almost out of time. You can set a number of minutes per day that you are allowed to use each app. The second step after “awareness,” for Samat, is “control.” The dashboard lets you set limits on your usage. Only instead of obsessing over your step count and calorie intake, you’re analyzing whether or not it’s a good idea for you to be opening your work email at 11PM. “If you think about your day, do you remember how much you’ve used your phone? Do you know what you’ve done?” Chances are, your answers to both questions aren’t very accurate.ĭashboard is designed to give you answers to those questions. Samat says that this dashboard is part of a two-step campaign to get you to have a better relationship with your phone. How long per day you’ve used each app on your phone, broken down hour by hour.A pie chart of how long you’ve used each app on your phone that day.How many minutes you’ve used your phone overall per day.It’s an app that gives you an almost overwhelming amount of information about your phone usage. The most interesting is the new usage dashboard. We feel like we have a responsibility to do more.”Īndroid P offers a handful of tools to help you keep your phone from bothering you, ranging from subtle tweaks to how notifications work to new features that literally keep you from using it. “We are the OS, and we feel like we need to be doing more around this area. It’s the largest mobile operating system in the world,” he says. Sameer Samat, VP of product management for Android, says that the company has been working on these tools for a long time based on user research, not a desire to draft off the growing wave of concern about distraction. Harris’ “Center for Humane Tech” helped kick off waves of stories about digital distraction and addiction earlier this year, which then metastasized into worries that our social media apps are hacking our brains. It’s a good time for Google to introduce the idea that it can help limit our tech obsessions. In terms of how it actually feels to use an Android device day-to-day, it could be the biggest update in years. This year, Android P (and no, Google isn’t saying what the “P” stands for yet) is full of visual changes and new features. Last year, Android Oreo was more about internal changes than user-facing features. That’s intriguing because Google is actually making progress on getting manufacturers to update their phones in a timely manner. It’s also available as a public beta starting right away on 11 different phones. It’s the biggest change to how users get around on their phones that I’ve seen in a long time. The feature is one of several that Google is combining into a theme it calls “Digital Well Being.” Presumably, it didn’t want to borrow “Time well spent,” the buzzy catchphrase popularized by ex-Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris and adopted (or better: co-opted) by Mark Zuckerberg.Īndroid P also includes a new core interface that uses iPhone-like navigation gestures and smarter ways to access functions that are usually buried away inside apps. Once your 30 minutes is up, the icon will go from its usual eye-catching gradient to a dull grayscale. You could give yourself a half-hour of Instagram per day, for example. It will also allow you to set limits on yourself. Instead of showing you all the ways you can use its phone operating system to do more, it’s creating features to help you use it less.Īndroid P, due out later this year, will have a new dashboard that tells you how often, when, and for how long you are using every app on your phone. This year, Google is doing something different with Android. How the new update could help you use your phone.
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