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Apple Inc. professed concern Tuesday at Tuesday at its Worldwide Apple Developers Conference that people are spending too much time with their devices.
The company has been promising for some time that it will introduce features to help maintain a healthy amount of device time, especially for children. Earlier this year major Apple investors let their concerns be known in a letter to Apple about the possible negative psychological effects of device addiction.
“There is a developing consensus around the world including Silicon Valley that the potential long-term consequences of new technologies need to be factored in at the outset, and no company can outsource that responsibility,” said the investors. Apple replied that changes are on the way.
“In iOS 12, we’re offering our users detailed information and tools to help them better understand and control the time they spend with apps and websites, how often they pick up their iPhone or iPad during the day and how they receive notifications,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said in a press release, echoing his comments onstage in San Jose, California.
One of the features is a “Do Not Disturb” option, something Apple says may help alleviate teachers’ and parents’ concerns that children are spending too much time on their smartphones when they should be concentrating on the class at hand. It may also help with getting a full night’s sleep.
Users will also be able to set their notifications, choosing which apps are able to send notifications or to block them all together. There will be a “Grouped Notifications” tab where all notifications can be managed in one spot. Siri can also get in on the deal, suggesting what notifications should be turned on or off based on what the user has acted upon in the past.
In any case, if you are perhaps spending way too much time on your device, you’ll know about it, because Apple will have a “Screen Time” feature. Even if one isn’t concerned about misuse of the technology, this feature lets you know exactly how much time you spend in each app, in every app and what notification made you pick up the device, which is useful information anyway.
If you think you’re overdoing on something such as Facebook, the “App Limits” feature will let you set a time limit for that app. Moreover, if parents think their kids are overdoing it, they can see exactly what the child has been doing on the device and set the limits themselves. This is perhaps the kind of parental control that might assuage the critics that are worried about kids being overwhelmed with technology.
Apple didn’t stop there, though. Parents can also choose when to inhibit a child’s use of their device by choosing “Downtime.” All apps can be turned off during certain times, such as study time or bedtime, or specific apps can be left on, such as the Phone app or Books. All this can be done remotely in Screen Time settings via the “Family Sharing” group. Family Sharing will first need to be setup, something Apple says takes a few minutes.
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