This simple but elegant app helps you cut back on smartphone addiction

Smartphone addiction and overuse is a growing health and societal concern, but curbing it can be difficult without a way to measure exactly how much time you spend staring at the screen in your hand. In the same way that it helps to have a scale to track progress when losing weight, quantifying your habits is a good first step in changing them.

Indian startup Emberify has come up with a simple and elegant solution with its new app, Instant. The app monitors and visualizes how often the user unlocks their phone and how much accumulated time the screen is active. A minimalist readout shows the metrics and charts them on a bar graph.

“Instant works on the same principle of fitness trackers, with graphs and limit reminders,” says Emberify founder Shashwat Pradhan. “It is meant to promote a healthy balance between our real lives and those that we live on our smartphones.”

Instant might seem rudimentary, but in reality there’s few other apps out there that serve the same purpose, and even fewer that do it in such an aesthetically pleasing way. The closest is probably Frequency, which shows time spent on specific apps. Instant takes a more overall approach, and by doing so succeeds in not adding to the problem it’s trying to solve: staring at the phone too much. A quick glance is all the user needs to ascertain relevant usage data.

“I also used to be glued to my device, using it for around 120 minutes a day,” Pradhan says. “Now I have brought it down to 50 minutes since I am more aware.”

He says the app consumes not more than one percent of the phone’s battery per day.

Instant is free on Google Play and 99 cents on Blackberry World with no ads or in-app purchases for the time being. A future update will include more lifestyle tracking metrics, like time spent driving, on Facebook, at the office, etc. Pradhan says some of these features will be in-app purchases.

See: Cure your children’s smartphone addiction with this app that will drive them crazy

This post This simple but elegant app helps you cut back on smartphone addiction appeared first on Tech in Asia.

This simple but elegant app helps you cut back on smartphone addiction