ISSUE 50 • ANDROID ADVISOR 51GOOGLE I/O 2018my screen might spur me to set some personal limits
on my phone. It’s like if Marlboro started handing
out nicotine patches with every carton of cigarettes
- lots of people would try them out even if they
didn’t plan to fully quit smoking.
Google’s plan with Digital Wellbeing isn’t just
to make us appreciate life outside our screens,
it’s also to make the interactions with our phones
more meaningful. Our days are filled with dozens
of meaningless interactions with our phones –
unimportant notifications, mindless social media
checks, time-killing games – and Google wants to
help us cut all of that out of our life, if we decide to
opt in. It’s not so much about using out phones less,
but concentrating the time we spend with them into
the things that are most important.
And that extends to the biggest detriment to
our well-being of all: late-night phone use. With a
feature called Wind down, Android P phones will
fade to grayscale at the end of the day and turn on
Do not disturb at bedtime, so we’ll be less tempted
to get lost in a YouTube hole when we’re supposed
to be sleeping. It’s just one more way Google is
encouraging us to balance our lives and restore
some sanity to our digital mental health.
During the I/O keynote, Pichai said Digital
Wellbeing was a “deep ongoing effort” that extends
beyond the walls of Google’s labs. It’s a four-
pronged plan that deeply involves the user in order to
understand our habits, focus on what happens, switch
off, and find balance for our families. And it just might
make us appreciate our phones even more, too.