After several years of intermittent social media usage, a few months ago, I decided to enforce strict limits on some apps. When the pandemic of 2020 started, I found myself browsing social media excessively. What seemed like an innocent desire to connect to people in a period of isolation quickly turned into act of feeding the frenzy. I’m introspective enough to tell the difference between natural human tendencies and obsessive anxiety-fuelled behaviour.
As of the last 2 weeks of July, here’s a screenshot of my App Limits:
So far, this has worked pretty well and I’ve had an easy time keeping my usage within these limits. However, the Screen Time feature on my iPhone has some serious limitations.
First of all, App Limits only applies to usage on mobile devices. What about desktop usage? I know there’s Screen Time on my Mac, but honestly it seems fairly complicated to set up. In fact, Screen Time on iOS itself took me a while to figure out and I’m tech-literate enough to code iOS apps. I can only imagine how difficult it must be for non-techy people to enable these limits. It feels like a feature designed by code-loving engineers, not designers.
(Edit: My friend @aareet{:target=’_blank’} pointed out that you can turn on syncing across desktop and mobile devices in Mac’s Screen Time. After spending a few minutes looking for it, I found it and it does block twitter.com from Safari if I’ve exhausted my 15 mins, so it’s functional. Though, I stand by my analysis that it’s still complicated to set up. The fact that I wasn’t aware of this and that nothing comes up when I search from Screen Time from my desktop is a testament to its obscurity on desktop.)
Secondly, App Limits treats all usage as the same. But usage is of different types. Mindlessly browsing an Instagram feed is a very different type of behaviour than having a deeply personal conversation in the app’s DM thread — the latter should not exhaust your limit. Watching an insightful interview embedded in a tweet is significantly different than being stuck in an infinite scroll of dumb replies to a viral tweet. The idea of limits is to prevent unhealthy app usage, but Apple’s Screen Time fails to address that in a robust manner.
I have no doubt in my mind that the future of app limits and screen time monitoring is in limiting different types of usage within an app intelligently. The technology to determine different types of usage has existed for well over a decade — it’s a central functionality of app analytics software. I suspect why this deep differentiating doesn’t already come bundled in with app limits is because only recently have people become mindful of healthy vs unhealthy app usage. But it’s functionality people are willing to pay for, for themselves and their children.
I feel that to some extent this is the responsibility of app developers. When developers publish apps, perhaps there should be some kind of basic standard that developers should be forced to comply to in terms of distinguishing healthy from unhealthy usage. Based on accepted patterns of functionality and their well-established relation to usage (feeds: unhealthy after a threshold, direct messaging: mostly healthy), developers ought to have a basic idea of what’s potentially good and bad behaviour.
Digital health organizations such as Center for Humane Technology{:target=’_blank’} and Civic Signals{:target=’_blank’} can definitely take a more active role in ushering in a world where developers are much more mindful of what they create.
What’s clear is that Apple, Google and the social media giants are doing very little in this area, considering how much power they possess around this issue. Perhaps, in cooperation with non-partisan bodies like the aforementioned digital health groups, it’s time for governments to implement regulations to force the tech giants to do more for mental health.