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Former Senior VP of Apple Tony Fadell Says Company Needs To Tackle Smartphone Addiction (wired.co.uk)
In an op-ed published on Wired, former SVP at Apple Tony Fadell argues that smartphone manufacturers -- Apple in particular -- need to do a better job of educating users about how often they use their mobile phones, and the resulting dangers that overuse might bring about. An excerpt: Take healthy eating as an analogy: we have advice from scientists and nutritionists on how much protein and carbohydrate we should include in our diet; we have standardised scales to measure our weight against; and we have norms for how much we should exercise. But when it comes to digital "nourishment", we don't know what a "vegetable", a "protein" or a "fat" is. What is "overweight" or "underweight"? What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like? I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in -- as with nutritional labelling. Interestingly, we already have digital-detox clinics in the US. I have friends who have sent their children to them. But we need basic tools to help us before it comes to that. I believe that for Apple to maintain and even grow its customer base it can solve this problem at the platform level, by empowering users to understand more about how they use their devices. To do this, it should let people track their digital activity in detail and across all devices.
So Apple is supposed to tell people NOT to use their products? Is personal responsibility really that foreign of a concept???
Tackling smartphone addiction -- there's an app for that, or well there nearly lis. The settings app, parental controls.
Add a feature to parental controls that blocks most functionality during certain hours. Whitelist who can be called or texted at any time, ex immediate family, or apps that can be run at any time, ex calculator, word processor, spreadsheet. Perhaps a whitelist of websites that can be visited at any time. Otherwise apps, text, websites will have to wait for non-school, non-work, or whatever the restricted timeframes are.
If the person with the problem is an adult let their significant other control the parental controls.
There, no government regulations involved. Industry provides a solution, Congress can declare victory and not get involved. The latter being the most important part of the preceding functionality.
Oh, lord. These tech execs falling all over themselves to tell us how much they hate their own products.
Puke.
Please just sell us more and let us decide for ourselves, instead of telling us "Your'e doing it wrong!" Shut up and give me more shiny things to play with.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
If a child is "addicted" to mobile devices, it's an issue with parenting. Maybe the parent is "addicted" as well. In any case, trying to un-addict the child is like treating final-stage cancer, whereas promoting prevention measures (ie, teaching good parenting) would likely be much more successful.
I find it odd that he's referred to as "former SVP at Apple Tony Fadell" rather than by his most recent major stint as the "co-founder and former CEO of Nest who was forcibly ousted after squandering hundreds of millions of Google's dollars". It strikes me as a flagrant attempt by Wired to avoid undermining the credibility of the source who is giving them material that makes for a sensationalist headline.
To be fair, Fadell's prior work—both with founding Nest and prior to that at Apple with the iPod and iPhone—is outstanding, but, so far as I've seen, he really has rested on his laurels for the last few years as the worldhas passed him by, so I'm not sure why we should be listening to what he has to say now.
But when it comes to digital "nourishment", we don't know what a "vegetable", a "protein" or a "fat" is. What is "overweight" or "underweight"? What does a healthy, moderate digital life look like?
Sorry.... ALL that is nonsensical. What is unhealthy is when you have a habit that is (1) Beyond your Control, and (2) Causes harm or prevents you from pursuing goals.
"Using a smartphone" is not one thing ---- there are MANY different things you could be doing, some of the things you do could be productive, some of them less-so, some may sharpen some skills or abilities, some may be fairly useless such as exchanging funny cat memes on social media: on the other hand, some of the things you do on a smartphone could be highly critical to meeting your goals, for example personal development/app-based education or training, scheduling business meetings, business transactions performed on the phone: If your entire work/career/job can fit into things done on your phone then you could justify 8 hours, no problem.
How often and how long you can use a smartphone: depends on where you are in life, and what you hope to achieve.
Most of us have many responsibilities and things we need to get done every week and a limited number of hours per day to get things done, And if we're not productive enough and not getting the important things done because one activity is eating up all the available time, THEN that's a problem, and we need to make a change.
OTHERWISE it's a subjective choice --- how much of your entertainment/free time do you want to spend in an app. Maybe you're concerned about relationships and SmartPhone usage taking time away from that - Well, there's no exact formula for that..... Maybe you chose to stay single; do you really think going out to drink at random bars could be healthier than staying at home and playing a game? If you're in a relationship --- how much time you should spend focused on a significant other or friend or family per week; that's different for every relationship, and how fulfilling people want it to be, And nobody outside has the right to tell you what that balance has to be. Same goes for how much time you're staring at a little screen per week.
Oh no! I was never taught what was a 'fat', a 'protein' or 'carbohydrate' with respect to books! Have I been reading the wrong books? Or too many books with blue covers?? What do I do? I can't possibly live without endless guidance from people, and I simply -have- to spend money on such a thing!!
The next iPhone will produce an electric shock through its case if you pick the phone up more than twice an hour or hold it longer than a minute. Perhaps it will give you 15 second delay just in case you are actually making a phone call in which case it will disable the shock until the call is ended.
Since when are companies responsible for policing an individual's self control? This is even more ridiculous than the "nanny state".
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
It's funny he chose protein and carbs as his example, because protein and sugar are the two things that food producers DON'T tell us how much we are eating. Go ahead, pick up the closest packaged food to you and look at the nutrition label. Protein and sugar are the only items that don't have a % daily value. Food producers don't put those numbers on there because they don't want their Snickers bars to have to say "3000%" recommended daily intake of sugar. Same with protein. Meat packers don't want to tell you that that steak you are eating has far more than the safe level of protein.
If they had to give consumers that information, consumers might make better choices.
I think that manufacturers and app developers need to take on this responsibility, before government regulators decide to step in -- as with nutritional labelling (sic).
I'm pretty sure the powers that be like the zombified masses, they're easier to manipulate. "Don't worry about thinking for yourself, keep up that Twitter #slacktivism!"
Even if they did step in, all they're going to do is put a warning label on the box: "Warning: Cell phones can be addictive!" Right below that will be a second warning for CA residents: "Cell phones have been shown to cause cancer in California."
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Then work to make it more resistible once it becomes an enormous success.
It's not THE PHONES. It's the services, information, data, tools, communication, maps and other things one gets to through that device that are the issue. People aren't addicted to their phones. They're addicted to their social contacts, to the news, to the novel they're reading, to the weather forecast, and such. Before those phones, they'd have been "addicted" to the AM radio while they were driving, they folded map they looked at, the printed novel they gazed at over lunch, the stock pages in the newspaper, the tabloid paper they picked up at the grocery store, and all of those other analogs.
How much novel reading or stock research is healthy? It's not the phones, just like it's not the guns, and not the spoons.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Just become some people are too stupid/lazy/weak that they can't pull their noses away from their phones that's Apple/Samsung's fault?
What the fuck is wrong with people that they believe this shit?
Do donut manufacturers agonize over donut addiction?
Do we expect them to?
I always laugh when some random internet guy like you thinks you're above the "masses".
Buddy, you are part of it. You're in the mix whether you like it or not. You're a sheep just like everyone else. You're as easy to manipulate as the rest of us.
No - you're not smarter or more perceptive. If you were, you would not even be here.
I would love to move back to a feature phone. Unfortunately, there is no feature phone I can find that has a camera as good as an iPhone 4, let alone a S9 or iPhone 8. A feature phone built like an iPhone SE (touch screen, same form factor and with a solid camera) and that can install some restaurant apps would be a great detox setup.
the xbox kinect used to judge me for playing too long. netflix judges me for watching too long. all it does is make me mad and ignore it even more than if i had naturally come to the conclusion.
... you haven't checked /. from your phone in the last 24 hours.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/pavlok-wristband-uses-electric-shock-break-bad-habits/
I think that phones could definitely become safer, not just through better education in how to use them but also through how the phone interacts with the user.
This is something that Apple, Google (and others makers of "Smartphone" OS:es) could do better.
For instance, if a phone detects movement it should either require that a handsfree/sync is connected or ask for confirmation that the user is not driving a vehicle.
Make the exception an app entitlement and approve for your app store only those where that entitlement makes sense.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
So why is Apple the company that needs to tackle Smartphone Addiction, and not smartphone OS merket leader Google? Can only be because Fadell knows which of his former two employers is able to actually do it.
Tony Fadell, head of the Google Glass division at Alphabet? Tony Fadell, founder of Nest?
Nah, he has to be "ex-Apple Tony Fadell" because the editors have a quota of headlines containing the word Apple.
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Some people are really addicted to smartphones. I don't think this is disease but I hate when all the round table stare at their phones! You can read my persuasive essay about this at https://persuasivepapers.com/.