A new wave of apps encouraging you to put your phone down.

Last year we spent on average 4.8 hours on our phones every day. That’s 1/3 of our waking hours. And bearing in mind we have to work, eat, and maybe even socialize in person, it’s hard to understand how we fit all that screen time in.

The majority of our screen time is taken up with social, video and photo sites, notably Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok and Instagram, and these platforms have become experts at keeping us engaged. How many of us have lost hours looking in on influencers’ perfect lives, or watching cute animals doing cuter things?

Welcome to infinite scroll. Invented in 2006 by Aza Raskin to make it easier for people to view content, even he admits that it might not have been good for us. In 2009 he tweeted, “One of my lessons from infinite scroll: that optimizing something for ease-of-use does not mean best for the user or humanity.” 

So why does the infinite scroll mean we do, literally, scroll endlessly? Apparently it's due to something called ‘unit bias’, the tendency for humans to complete the ‘unit’ of whatever it is that has been given to them, be it a plate of food, a glass of wine…..or online content. Because there is, by design, no end to the infinite scroll, we just keep on going. 

And this has been shown to have severe consequences: obsessive/compulsive behaviours, anxiety, loss of productivity, reduced physical activity, depression. Most of us would agree that we spend too much time on our phones, but how can we break out of this cycle of addiction?

There are plenty of apps out there designed to help you track and limit your..erm….app time. You can even schedule your broadband to switch off at a certain time. And thankfully, there are some new apps emerging which have been designed specifically to limit how much time you can spend on them.

These apps are here to help you break free of the endless scrolling:

Wordle: our new favourite online puzzle, this is a great example of less is more. Work out the day’s word, and that is it…no more! Come back tomorrow. And come back we do, with over 300,000 people playing every day.

BeReal: the latest social media app to take on the likes of Instagram and facebook, this one is a little different. You can only make 1 post each day, and it has to be at a specified time. That way there’s no curating allowed, encouraging us to share the (grim?) reality of our daily lives. It’s not glamorous, but it is REAL.

Thursdays: this dating app only allows you to go on there on..yep… Thursdays. They found that people were getting worn down by dating apps and the endless swiping was leading to dating fatigue. They believe having just 1 day a week to date fuels action and spontaneity.

Untagged: we’d also borne witness to the infinite scroll of fashion resale apps and the decision fatigue that set in as a result. Uniquely, Untagged limits how many items you can view each time (just 20), and changes them up for your next visit, so you need to make quick decisions otherwise you might miss out. Not only that, cash is taken out of the system with clothes being traded in TT, the app’s in-game currency, making it free to trade items.

Let's find more ways to make our devices work for us again, not the other way around!