The wake of the smartphone is immense: new messages from friends, funny photos on Instagram, new videos on YouTube - and then you have to crack the next level at Fortnite. There is always a good reason to keep the smartphone in your hand or to get it out of your pocket. In order to escape the adhesive effect of apps, but there are in Android but appropriate functions.
We do not recommend third-party apps, because they may spread uncontrolled information about your usage behavior. Operating system's own functions are summarized under the menu item "Digital Wellbeing & Parental Control". The concept was first introduced in May 2018 and has been available in Google Pixel's Android 9 smartphones since the fall. With Android 10 it should get the other smartphones, it said. Samsung, Huawei and other smartphone manufacturers took the installation of the detoxing functions probably too long. They have now supplemented their own user interfaces with such skills.
At the moment you can find in Android the typical patchwork of solutions that sometimes work well and sometimes less well and are sometimes easier and sometimes harder to set. Therefore, from the Android version of your smartphone alone, you can not determine which digital wellbeing features it masters. For example, while Google Pixel and devices with Android One - for example the Nokia 8 - also the Motorola One Zoom and the Galaxy S10 from Samsung have the wellbeing menu item, this is the case with the OnePlus 5T with Android 9 (Oxygen OS 9.0.8). not the case. Only with the version jump to Android 10, the function is actually common property - as in the just presented OnePlus 7T.
At Samsung, "Digital Wellbeing" has been introduced in the in-house user interface One UI, but not on all devices. The useful app control can be found on the Galaxy S10 (from One UI 1.1) and the Galaxy Note 10 (with One UI 1.5), but not yet on the Galaxy Note 8 (One UI 1.0).
The detoxing cures of the manufacturer
You can find out if your smartphone has corresponding functions via the Settings menu. There you will find the menu item "Digital Wellbeing" in pure Android; at Huawei he is called "Digital Balance", at Samsung "Digital Well-Being". The manufacturers understand this as functions that make it comprehensible to users, how intense and what they use their smartphones - and within limits allow corrective action.
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Huawei Digital Balance informs about pauses between unlocks.
Google's "Digital Wellbeing" and Samsung's "Digital Wellbeing" differ only in nuances, such as in formulations. Huawei, on the other hand, has more autonomy in his Digital Balance function. So it warns quite comfortable even before a total too long service life of the smartphone.
Your time is over!
In pure Android, you can optionally display your own icon in the app list - to do so, tick the entry in the Wellbeing menu. When calling up the menu item or the icon, a dashboard appears, with which you can first get an overview. It shows how much time you spend with each application. In addition, you can at this point the individual apps time limits - in Android they are called timers - set, in 5-minute intervals. With Huawei and Samsung the timers are adjustable to the minute.
With the app limits you can set but not all apps limits: The access to the telephony app and on the settings menu can not be limited, with Huawei and Samsung, the camera and some system apps are excluded from the app time limits ,
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The dashboard of Huawei Digital Balance shows that the locks can be secured by PIN.
With Android 10, users get slightly finer options. So each app can now be set in the respective app details its own limit; the way through the above dashboard is no longer the only one.
Too bad: With the app limits, only individual apps can be included, but not entire app categories such as social media apps or games. As practical as it would be to temporarily put whole categories to the curb - it does not work.
With the expiration of the time for an app limit, a note appears, by tapping the field "more information" you get to the dashboard, where you can simply override the limit. In Androids Digital Wellbeing and Samsung, so the developers have not installed a hard lock. Only parents can use the parental controls in the same menu item to regulate the useful life of their children from their own devices.
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The Dashboard from Androids Digital Wellbeing gives an overview of the use of the smartphone.
On Huawei devices, when you reach an app time limit, a page-filling tip appears. Here, too, one can allow the further use immediately either quarter-hourly or grant the general absolution equal for the rest of the day. In addition, you can create locks for individual apps PIN-secured - or as a precaution to leave friends or partners, so you do not know the PIN.
Relaxation
Smartphones also need periods of time when the devices give users as little reason as possible to pick them up.
In Android, in the so-called relaxation mode, users specify by means of a schedule when the smartphone should automatically switch to the "do not disturb" mode or when the display should only display grayscale. For Samsung, this mode is called idle. Huawei calls it bedtime; In addition to the above options, Huawei's smartphones optionally block the use of apps except for self-selected exceptions, which is just as easy to circumvent as when the app's time limit is exceeded. Elegant is already the purpose of alienating the ultra-low power mode. With that, only up to six self-selected apps can be used; Push services are switched off, but you have to set the silent mode yourself.
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For "Do not disturb" many exceptions can be defined, so that important things do not go down.
One of the most striking behaviors of homo smartphonensis is the frequent in-the-hand-taking of the smartphone, to check "only briefly", if new messages have arrived. The Digital Wellbeing tool is powerless: The Dashboard shows how many times the device has been unlocked and apps have been opened, but does not provide a way to set a limit or to set compulsive pauses for opening apps.
Too tough, the digital governess "Digital Wellbeing" does not go to court with too many users. After all, Drastic media offers OnePlus for newer devices. The so-called Zen mode locks the device either for 20, 40 or 60 minutes. That's how long the user gets to almost nothing, whether he has a PIN or not. During this time, only the phone and camera app can start - otherwise, only the countdown runs on the display, until the self-imposed lock is off.
Rest, damn it!
While detoxing features are relatively new, you can set your phone to silent for a while, use vibration alerts or less intrusive ringtones, and adjust their volume. With the mode "Do not disturb" you can activate many settings in one step, if the smartphone should give it some rest.
In its hardest possible setting, the mode only allows calls from certain preset contacts, the display remains dark when an SMS or messaging message arrives and notifications are signaled either acoustically or by LEDs. With the handy schedules, the smartphone automatically turns on the request-do-not-disturb mode in certain time windows, such as at night.
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How chatty are apps? The number of notifications helps to lock out the correct ones.
For the everyday situation that a smartphone just roars in the middle of a meeting - possibly with embarrassing ringing tone -, you can also provide. In the menu item "Settings / Do not disturb / Schedules" can be set, that the smartphone automatically sets the request-do-not-disturb mode for registered appointments in the calendar. In fine tuning can be set very fine granular any exceptions: So you can prevent the display of incoming messages, but allow, but also that a light emitting diode discreetly.
In our tests, the "do not disturb" settings did not always behave as desired. For example, even though alerts were invariably turned off, our Note 8 review device displayed incoming WhatsApp calls on screen. "Classic" calls or those via telegram, on the other hand, were suppressed as desired.
(Group) chats in messengers like WhatsApp or Telegram can grow to plague with a large number of popping up messages. Again and again activates the display, constantly buzzing the smartphone - because you can hardly resist. As of Android 10, alerts are sorted by. Above are the high priority, less important messages are landing lower. Unlike the channel notifications of notifications, the app sets these priorities, but the user: What you consider more important, you change with two finger tips directly in the bar.
New are Silent Notifications. They do not peep and do not make themselves obtrusively noticeable otherwise. With the notification bar extended, Android summarizes all the Silent Notifications so that they can be deleted in one go. However, here again the app determines what is "Silent" and what is important.
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The relaxation mode regulates when the smartphone is less noticeable.
Even those who do not have Android 10 can stem the tide. Almost all messengers today allow you to specify separately for each conversation, whether notifications should appear for it and with what sounds you want the environment to share.
No sound in the cinema
Unless too long or at the wrong time, a smartphone can interfere or distract you in the wrong place. Unfortunately, Android's wellbeing feature does not analyze the location - the iOS solves better. For digital detoxing, the location is neither used in Android nor on the user interfaces of Samsung and Huawei.
After all, Samsung's assistant Bixby can create location-dependent routines reminiscent of the IFTTT automation tool ("If this then that"). However, Bixby only has access to a few relevant functions: Bixby automatically silences Samsung smartphones in certain locations, but apps are not locked out, apps are open, or screen time is down - bad for chronic WhatsApp and Facebook checkers ,
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Notifications can be prioritized and less important ones become less intrusive.
Such functions would be easily imaginable: If you look at your location history via the timeline menu in Google Maps, for example, you will be able to easily trust an Android smartphone that detects it by localization, but also by the analysis of online ticket purchases in the Gmail account. that you are in a movie theater, and suggest switching to Please-Do-Not-Disturb mode. The same could be imagined for the workplace.
Laborious: profiles
Those who use the same mobile phone professionally and privately can use so-called profiles to prevent the spilling of occupational messages into their free time and - in other words - to prevent seminal messages from the cones group from being collected at the departmental meeting. For example, apps assigned to the job profile no longer send notifications when they're on their personal profile.
In practice, this is tedious and requires some storage space in the smartphone, because the second profile behaves, roughly speaking, like a second smartphone, which is booked under the same SIM card. After switching to the second profile, data stored in the first profile, such as photos or PDFs, can not be reached - unless they use the same Google Account. All apps needed for the second profile must be reinstalled and all account information needs to be re-authorized.
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Different accounts make a rocky path to more peace.
What does it help?
Android's well-being function is as touchingly harmless as a cup of chamomile tea; iOS gives the user already more powerful medicine. The limits in Android are soft as wax, and for professionals in Prokrastinieren it is no problem to find workarounds: If the Facebook app is locked, you call the appropriate page via a browser - which is not in iOS. If in turn the Android browser runs into the limit, you instantly install a new one for which no limit is set.
Even if Digital Wellbeing shut down users from apps or even from the entire smartphone tough, that would be only device-related and not for all devices in the Google Account. In the evenings on the couch, one then reaches for an empty-shell smartphone for a tablet or for the actually discarded second device.
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Digital Wellbeing should therefore be seen as an eye-opener for one's own behavior. It gives a good overview of how long, how often and for what you use a smartphone; the app limits you set could interpret as a warning finger.
What works on the whole but properly: Notifications and sounds can be well tamed and at night, for example, completely turn off, but also define exceptions, so that important people can reach you at any time.
The fact that Android wants to extensively use user data for individually automated locking and rest functions is the toad that one has to swallow for it.
