Google has a new purpose: helping the users to have a healthier relationship with the technology. For this reason it’s creating some applications that help to use less the smartphone, and to have a healthier life. To bring forward this good intention, it’s doing some experiments in the project Digital Wellbeing. This is a platform that brings together developers and designers so to let them share their own ideas, with the purpose to be able to find the right balance between life and technology.
The obsessive need to control the smartphone, the continuos notifications, the mail that autonomously opens itself, mean that we are never able to really leave this device, by degrading the human relationships. More and more often around the streets, on the public transports, but even on the table of a restaurant, we can see people constantly bowed on the screen and often basically mute. Even the children are ever more victims of it: both because they already established a kind of addiction or because of specific marketing strategies (for example in some famous fast food were installed some screens with games and tablets straight on the tables), or even, worst, for the parents’ wish (so to have the children busy).
For this reason there are many ideas to stop the problem: from the boring smartphone to the many apps available on the stores. Google, especially, is developing some applications to let the usage of the smartphone more conscious.
The applications to use less the smartphone
Unlock Clock
This app, is easily downloadable from the Play Store, it is a live wallpaper. Besides the time, the temperature and the date, in the middle, big and well visible we will be able to read how many times the screen was unlocked. The counting includes both a swipe, a pin insertion or the fingerprint recognition.
We Flip
This application results really interesting (and much more innovative), it is a system that works only if all the person of a group installed it. Once ready we all switch on the application together, the first one that unlock the phone ends the session. The application now tells how many minutes we were able to say without the mobile phone and who stopped the session. This to invite the people to spend more time without distractions and without mobile phones.
Paper Phone
The more drastic of all (and maybe the less ecologic), allows to select the most important things that might be useful during the day: like the list of the things to do, the calendar with the appointments, the most important contacts. Then the application creates a paper to print and to fold, to have all we need available so to use less the smartphone during the day.
Applications to manage the notifications
Post Box
Post Box collects the notifications for you, and it allows you to check the smartphone only during some specific moments of the day.
Morph
Always about the notifications Morph goes even further, it allows infact to determinate, by setting place and time, which notification we can see and which one we can not. For the work we can so give the priority to apps like Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar. While once arrived at home it’s possible to enable only the one of whatsapp, or maybe no one of them. Infact this appication allows to create many launchers for every occasion: from the family parties, to the sports activities.
Desert Island
With a so evocative name, this application allows to choose only 7 apps to use during 24h. At the end of the day we will be able to see a usage statistic of the smartphone, to understand if we were able to keep the promise.
This post is also available in: