The iPhone feature has a fundamental flaw.
One Saturday last month, I had a perfect day. I woke early, drove up the California coastline, and surfed for a couple of hours with friends. Then I met up with another friend nearby, went kayaking, and ate a late lunch. After that—sun-worn and salty—I drove home, washed off my gear, walked the dog, and ate pizza on my couch.
A big part of what made the day so perfect was all the time spent outside—away from work deadlines, chores, and screens. Yet despite my best effort to escape, I still logged six hours of screen time, more than usual. Two hours and 52 minutes of that was spent on Google Maps. An hour came from texting. I also spent 45 minutes on Safari (shopping for a dress for an upcoming wedding), 24 minutes on Spotify (listening to music), and 10 minutes on Venmo (paying some friends for recent meals). None of this was a bad use of my phone—it wasn’t like I was doomscrolling. Still, when I saw the total number that evening, after checking my iPhone’s Screen Time tool, I couldn’t help but feel a reflexive jolt of guilt. Six hours?
Screen Time is a curious thing: an Apple feature designed to help people be more mindful about using their Apple gadget. First launched in 2018, Screen Time provides daily and weekly reports on how long you’re spending on your iPhone or iPad, broken down by app. After opting in to Screen Time, you’re likely to encounter what I call the Sunday-morning guilt trip, a weekly recap delivered as a push notification. “Your screen time was up 20 percent last week,” it might say, “for an average of 4 hours, 15 minutes a day.” Screen Time also lets you set limits on specific apps—say, restricting TikTok use to just 20 minutes a day.
Apple has championed Screen Time as a way for people to “take control” of their phone usage in this age of screen anxiety—an attempt to reassure customers that Apple is working in their favor. At no point does Screen Time ever outright tell you to consider putting down your phone, but the implication is clear: Ideally, you want your weekly screen-time numbers to be trending down, not up. People find themselves reaching for their phone at every idle moment, potentially wasting hours watching cat videos on Instagram. Of late, concerns about phone addiction have only escalated. A recent best-selling book by the NYU sociologist Jonathan Haidt blames phones, in part, for creating an “anxious generation,” and last month, the surgeon general called for social-media apps to have a tobacco-esque warning label.
[Read: Instagram is not a cigarette]
The problem is that Screen Time—the Apple tool, and the broader fixation—doesn’t seem to help. The main issue is that it flattens phone usage into a single number. “We treat screen time as this unitary experience,” Nicholas Allen, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and the director of its Center for Digital Mental Health, told me. “And of course, it’s an incredibly diverse experience. It can be everything from finding out useful information, to being bullied, to catching up on the news, to watching pornography, to connecting with a friend.”
When it comes to the health consequences of phones, so much depends on context. How someone uses an app matters, as well which app. One person might use Instagram to message with friends, whereas another could just scroll their feed aimlessly, feeling worse about themselves. “If I just say, ‘How much time do you spend on social media?,’ I don’t get the nuance,” David Bickham, the research director at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. Scrolling through your camera roll is fun if you’re looking at vacation photos; it’s maybe not so great if you’re obsessing over pictures of your ex.
Much of the concern about screen time is about one specific kind: social media. Parents in particular worry that a recent spike in adolescent anxiety and depression is the result of too much scrolling Instagram or TikTok and not enough hanging out in person. (Famously, Facebook’s own leaked internal research found that Instagram can harm teen girls’ body image.) But the research focusing on teens specifically is hotly contested. One study found that the relationship between digital tech use and teen mental health is “negative but small”—too small to guide public policy. The effects on adults are murky too: One meta-analysis of more than 200 studies on well-being and social-media use—studies that spanned countries and age groups—found only small correlations, which varied based on demographics, location, and the type of use.
Instead of fixating on time, experts I spoke with recommend reflecting on how certain applications make you feel. “Really, the best thing is to get people to reflect and be aware of, Oh my God, I’m doomscrolling here,” Allen said. The one exception both Allen and Bickham made was sleep: No matter what you’re doing on your phone, if it’s interrupting your sleep, you’re better off putting down the device and snoozing.
Screen Time is just a tool, of course. It’s up to people themselves to moderate their phone usage. But it is an imperfect tool. Screen Time can be used to put a time limit on an app, but it is too easy to bypass. When a time limit is reached, a tool issues a pop-up warning—but then offers to add time to the limit, or to suspend it indefinitely. Getting back on the app takes just a few taps (and maybe entering a password). Over email, an Apple spokesperson did not answer my question about whether Apple has any evidence that Screen Time actually helps people cut back on phone usage.
Apple is in a weird spot. The company that makes smartphones and oversees the App Store doesn’t exactly have a good reason to tell you to stop tapping. Screen Time is just one especially popular tool in a whole anti-smartphone ecosystem—technology to fix the problem of using technology too much. Google also has its own set of screen-time-reduction tools for Android, called Digital Wellbeing, the design of which is similar to Apple’s.
While reporting this story, I tried five other screen-time apps: Opal, ClearSpace, OffScreen, ScreenZen, and Freedom. In addition to apps, there are dumb phones that have only basic functionality, and boxes you can lock your phone in. A company called Brick makes a physical device—a gray square—that, when scanned, blocks unwanted apps. You can hide the device or place it across the room, so that you have to walk over to regain access. YouTubers make videos about how to redesign your iPhone home screen to minimize distraction.
Some of these tools seem to work better than Screen Time. They block you from being able to open a distracting app outright, or force you to wait five seconds or take a deep breath before launching whatever it is you tapped on. But there are no easy answers here. A lot of the concerns around phones have focused on teens, nuance that sometimes gets lost: “Do not confuse the conversations about phones being bad for 15-year-olds with phones being bad for grown adults,” Katie Notopoulos wrote in Business Insider this spring.
Screen Time and the whole ecosystem of tools like it reinforce the vague sense that everyone should be using their phone less, even if we’re not exactly sure why. The problem with the smartphone is also its greatest achievement: The device squishes an enormous amount of capability into the palm of your hand. So much of it is necessary. So much of it is a waste. People do have good reasons to cut down on phone usage. Smartphones can distract us, overwhelm us, spoil our mood, and even mess with our posture and eyesight. But the tortured relationship that people have with their screens doesn’t get better if you simply remind people that they have a tortured relationship with their screens. No one needs to be made to feel guilty for using Google Maps or streaming a YouTube exercise class or texting their parents a picture of their dog.
The truth is, the perfect day can involve using your phone a lot. And that’s okay.
