Revolutions in efficiency don’t always crown the best of kings. Think of two of the most ubiquitous corporations in the world today, Apple and McDonald’s. Through technological innovation they created products—the every-gadget-in-one iPhone and the assembly-line-built Big Mac—that simplified daily life and, theoretically, granted people more time for higher pursuits. Instead of being a solution to the stresses of modern life, though, fast food became a new problem in and of itself. So it is with the smartphone. Today America is a nation gorging on easy, empty calories, both online and off.
Kevin Holesh, a Pittsburgh-based app developer, saw the parallels between physical health and online health several years ago when he found himself spending too many hours buried in email and Twitter. “I was looking at my Fitbit on my wrist and [I thought,] I wish I had a Fitbit for the amount of time I was spending on my phone,” he says.
In 2014 he built an iOS app called Moment, which tracks how much time users spend on their phones and sends them reminders as they approach or exceed their daily threshold. Moment analyzes the iPhone’s battery usage metrics to track the screen time of individual apps. It can also spit out often-embarrassing statistics, like how many times per day you pick up your phone or what percentage of your waking life is spent staring at a five-inch screen.
The app was a hit from the start, attracting attention from both tech blogs and the mainstream press. Interest in a buzzy app often fades over time, but Moment’s user base has risen steadily. In 2017, the app was downloaded 2.3 million times, nearly triple the figure in 2016. “Moment’s business has basically exploded,” says Holesh, who charges $3.99 for a premium version of the app. “This issue is increasing in its awareness and people are looking for solutions.”
Moment’s spike in popularity speaks to an ongoing shift in people’s relationships with their closest technological companion. Once viewed as futuristic marvels (in college, my friends and I referred to the iPhone as a “spacephone”), today’s smartphones inspire many people to feel a mixture of guilt, obligation, and dopamine-induced craving when using. The tech companies building these addictive tools know there’s something wrong. In December, Facebook said that spending time on social media can be unhealthy for people in some contexts, a stark admission from such an endlessly chipper brand. In January, two large Apple investors urged the company to take steps to curb smartphone addiction among children. And a growing number of the modern digital world’s architects, from the creators of Facebook’s Like button to one of the designers of the original iPhone, are acknowledging that their inventions have had negative consequences.
So far the hand-wringing hasn’t led to any decisive action, at least none that empowers individuals. (Facebook claims it is introducing sweeping, benevolent changes to its News Feed algorithm, but users will be the guinea pigs for these changes rather than the arbiters.) No tech giant is making an effort to help people put control of their digital lives back in their own hands. Now feels like a time when there should be a dozen different Moment-like apps vying to help people control their phone usage, just as dozens of fitness-tracking apps help us count steps and calories.
Many smartphone owners have had at least a brief dalliance with a health app, hoping to lose weight, eat better, or sleep more soundly. Fitbit, a leading wearables company, has found success by keeping its app’s dashboard focused on a few broad, easy-to-understand metrics such as steps taken, miles traveled, and calories burned. People who check their stats regularly tend to stick with an active routine—the company has said that 70 percent of the people who weighed in on its Aria 2 smart scale every day had shed pounds after six months. “Being able to have all this data and this total picture in one place, it allows you to make strategic changes as to how you want to move forward,” says Daniel Shaw, a senior product marketing manager for Fitbit. “It gives you a standard.”
Of course, the group of people shelling out money for Fitbits is a self-selecting, health-conscious crowd. For the broader population, the mere presence of usage stats isn’t guaranteed to lead people to better choices. According to Mitesh Patel, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, fitness trackers can facilitate changes in physical activity among people who are already motivated, but they don’t do much to alter the habits of those who don’t want to exercise. Health stats are most useful when placed in a context that drives users toward specific goals, such as a gamified reward system, a financial incentive, or competition with a peer group (Fitbit’s app uses badges as rewards and lets people compare activity stats with their friends). “A wearable might tell you that your average step count is 5,000 steps, but just knowing that it’s 5,000 steps for most people is not enough to help them increase that to 7,000 steps,” Patel says. “We could monitor people’s app usage just like a wearable device monitors your step counts, and that will make people more aware. But that by itself is unlikely to change people’s behavior.”
While information alone can’t change behavior, making people aware of their amount of physical activity is a useful first step, Patel says. When Apple introduced the Health app to iOS 8 in 2014, millions of iPhone owners suddenly had access to a pedometer, whether they’d dabbled in fitness-tracking apps before or not. My mother, for example, now uses the Health app religiously to track her steps, exercising more than she ever did before she had a smartphone. “Defaults are very powerful,” Patel says. “If you don’t do anything to your iPhone, it’s still tracking your step counts … it definitely is a move in the right direction.”
The closest default equivalent for online health is the iOS battery-settings screen, which shows how much time people spend looking at each individual app across a seven-day period. But the iPhone doesn’t log this info over longer stretches of time, and it provides no context for a user’s consumption habits. What’s worse, limitations in the iOS API prevent a third party from creating an app that could comprehensively aggregate phone usage data or lock users out of specific apps after a set period of time, according to Holesh. Users have resorted to other work-arounds to curbing their phone use, like trawling through the Accessibility settings to turn their device’s display grayscale. But Apple’s not going far enough to help iPhone owners live healthy online lives, and it’s not letting third parties innovate much in the space, either.
This is a big missed opportunity, according to Cliff Kuang, a product strategist and coauthor of an upcoming book on the history of product design called User Friendly: How the Hidden Rules of Design Are Changing the Way We Live, Work & Play. While there’s a big psychological gap between reading your step count on a screen and actually feeling motivated to walk out of your front door, the iPhone has the ability to both tell users about their app usage and automatically set up roadblocks to stop unhealthy habits. “How many times have you had an Apple Watch that told you to stand and you ignored it?” Kuang says. “I think it’s much more feasible to do something like that for the technology in your life just because the nature of the system [and] all the variables of having a calm day reside in that technology.”
In an ideal world, companies like Apple and Google would spend as much time helping us unplug from our devices as they do loading them with more and more widgets. Kuang champions the idea of a “super-smart mute button” that could help stem the endless tide of notifications. “Imagine if you just woke up one day and you had an app and you could tell it, ‘I want a quiet day of relaxation.’ … We don’t have anything right now that exists at that level of abstraction that basically mediates for us in a way that humans understand,” Kuang says. “Everybody in the system is incentivized to bother you.”
The incentive challenge will be a tough one to surmount. There’s obvious money to be made in fitness trackers because wearables are expensive and everyone aspires to be in better shape. It’s unclear how much the iPhone user actually cares about curtailing their use of Facebook—and even if they do, a product that helped them do so would run completely counter to Facebook’s business interests. The stated altruism of Silicon Valley companies and their financial imperative to grow at all costs are increasingly contradictory aims.
Fast food grew unchecked for a long time too, but today people are at least more aware of its downsides. Step in a McDonald’s and you’ll see calorie counts on the menu, which you can log on a health-tracking app if you so choose. That’s not necessarily enough to stop people from eating Big Macs, but it does present the idea that moderation—in all things—is good.
“If you look at Apple and Google and you look at the people actually working there, you talk to them, they’re totally into this idea of calmer technology that is less [about] plunging us into unthinking amounts of engagement,” Kuang says. “But they have to have a reckoning. They have to say that this is a problem we need to fix at a base level.”
