If you looked into the nitty-gritty of the rough-and-tumble use you give your smartphone every day you’d surely be shocked by some things. App Usage is an app that does just what it says on the tin: keeps track of all the activities you do with your smartphone in terms of the amount of time you spend on and how many times you open each app, as well as all your app updates and installations. The results after a few days of use are surprising.
It’s not the first time we’ve discussed this kind of app. QualityTime monitors the time of usage, but stopped there with mere observation. App Usage take it a step further, as once it collects your demented usage statistics (50 screen unlocks per day glaring at you from a distance), you can set it up to send notifications when you surpass a certain number of minutes on an app or open it a certain number of times. This is no witchhunt – may every smartphone user do whatever she likes with her own fingers – but once we’re faced with the cold hard facts of the extent of our smartphone addiction, it doesn’t hurt efforts to improve the mindfulness of our usage.
The app’s activity history section stores all the actions you’ve carried out, including opening apps, making calls, or locking your screen. Likewise, the usage history gives a breakdown of the minutes spent on each app and the respective percentages of the total time. All this monitoring is what lets you make use of App Usage’s other features, like a widget that auto-displays a box with shortcuts to the apps you use most. You can set it to send you a daily report of the data collected, and even set a max app usage time after which you’ll get a warning. Both features are fully customizable.
Have no fear when using App Usage. None of us like a having a second mother constantly hassling us about phones frying our brains, but it’s quite revealing to observe oneself from a different angle. Leave a comment below with your own conclusions after trying it!
More information | Official website
Header image | Freepik
