App To Monitor Phone Usage Time
Another free app called Menthal shows Android users their “information weight,” a summation of their phone use that is charted against other users’ scores. Methal, which was designed by a team of German researchers at the University of Bonn, will also tell you how often you unlock your phone, open apps like Facebook and receive calls, among other metrics.
This app is a great idea and I would love if it worked. This first week or so I used the app, it would track my usage well, but then it started to lose my trust. The amount of time I spent on my phone started to grow a ton even though I felt like I was using my phone the same amount. I checked the usage (or whatever it’s called) tab in the app and the numbers the time it said I was using it throughout the day didn’t add up. For instance I would do the math based on what it said my pickups and usage time was and it would come out to more than an hour under what the overall total was. In my mind, I was like this makes sense they’re trying to sell a product that makes you decrease your phone usage, or at least makes you feel like you are decreasing your phone usage, so it makes sense to inflate the numbers to then just show the actual numbers once people buy the premium product or whatever it’s called. Now, I didn’t wanna just leave it at that, I wanted to be thorough, so I tracked my phone usage myself and compared it to the app’s purported usage and my hypothesis was correct and the app inflated your usage. Its too bad the developers have chosen to inflate the numbers, I think this is a great idea with great potential to actually help people use their phones less and connect with people around them more, but it’s part of a business model and has to make a profit so I understand why they have made the choices they have.
“Right away, I noticed that I was way off in my own estimation,” Holesh said. He estimated he was spending 45 or 55 minutes a day on his phone, and his fiancee thought her use was around 60 minutes. They both ended up clocking in around double those numbers, he said.
It may seem silly to add an app to free up time for interacting with the real world. Do you really need to check your phone to see how often you’re checking your phone? Holesh said friends were skeptical at first.
“I’m blown away when at noon it tells me I’ve already checked my phone 73 times,” Rosen said. “It shows on a map where you check your phone, and even though I know better than this, I checked multiple times when I was on the freeway.”
According to data from Nielsen, adults in the U.S. spent an average of more than 30 hours a month on their phones at the end of 2013. That figure was up from 18 hours a month at the end of 2011. Some people, like Holesh, spend longer stretches of time on their phones, and others unlock their phones hundreds of times a day to quickly check texts, Facebook or email.