Google Has Launched Six Anti-Smartphone Apps, What Are They?

Admit it, you are spending way too much time on your smartphone, more than you should, we all are. Many of us would rather stick our eyes on the phone than interacting with people in person, in real life. Google is well aware of this, so it rolled out a set of six experimental apps with the aim of curbing out smartphone addiction.

1. Paper Phone

This may be the best among the six apps. With Paper Phone, every day, you are challenged to print out a customized “paper phone” while leaving the real phone at home. As weird as it sounds, it does work.

In the paper phone, you can include the tasks for that day, items from your calendar, a weather report, or directions to a place. Google has also added some fun stuff such as origami instructions and puzzles.

2. Post Box

This app takes over all the notifications on your phone and delivers them at certain times during the day. You can see the notifications in the app, and only have to open other apps if you want to do something there.

It has a beautiful design and it works effectively, helping you stop thinking about the phone until the next time it deliveries notifications. However, you can’t choose which app it collects notifications from, it just handles everything.

The way this app works poses a problem: not everyone wants to be uncontactable completely for a period of time. This depends on a lot of things like your work, your family, etc. Hopefully, Google will change this app to optimize its effectiveness in the future.

3. Desert Island

Though this app is not as effective as the Post Box app, it is probably the cleverest one among the six.

Once you put the app in charge of your phone, it will take over the home screen launcher, restricts your access to only seven apps that you select. It reminds us of how many apps we use each day and you have to focus on the most important ones.

However, you can still get at the other apps and notifications will pop up normally. When the day ends, you can view the report of how well you have done and challenge yourself to access fewer apps tomorrow.

4. Morph

With Morph, you have limited access to apps by place and time. you have some at work, some at night, and others at the gym, etc. Morph also takes over the home screen launcher on your smartphone.

It’s also a smart app where different modes can be automatically switched on, based on the phone’s location and the time. And you won’t get notifications from apps that are not supposed to be in use at the time or the place. But you can manually swap between modes, which may ruin the effectiveness a bit.

5. We Flip

This app is suitable for when you’re with family and friends as it detects nearby devices that run the app, and put your phone into Do Not Disturb mode as you all flick a switch on the screen at the same time.

The idea behind We Flip is that you ignore your phone for the longest you can, either for a certain period of time or until one of you cracks. And when the session is unlocked, you can view its duration as well as the number of times you peek at the notifications on your lock screen without really looking at the phone.

6. Unlock Clock

Not a fully formed app, this is more like a live wallpaper. To apply it, after downloading Unlock Clock from Google Play Store, you have to press on a blank area on your home screen, choose Wallpapers, choose Live wallpapers.

Essentially, it changes the phone’s wallpaper to indicate the number of times you have unlocked the phone on that day through slowly-ticking digits every time you enter your PIN code or press on the fingerprint reader. You cannot change the colors or font of the wallpaper.