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.

Comments

Well that's an odd way of describing him...

[Anubis IV]

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.