Google Has Five News Apps And Games That Are All About Reducing Your Screen Time

When Google introduced Digital Wellbeing last year, it already had a rather robust set of functionalities designed to let users see how much time they are spending on their smartphones. And to hopefully reduce it. now, Google wants to expand the Digital Wellbeing’s capabilities with five new apps—Unlock Clock, Post Box, We Flip, Desert Island and Morph. These are now available for download on Android phones via the Google Play Store.

The Unlock Clock app for your Android phone brings a new live wallpaper that lets you keep track of how many times you may have unlocked your phone during the day. This is, in a way, a shortcut to the Digital Wellbeing app itself, without you actually having to specifically open it and keep a track of the phone usage.

The Post Box app is quite smart, to be honest. It is designed to allow you to choose when you want notifications to be delivered on your phone—perhaps you want a no-disturb time for a meeting, driving or just to wind down. The app will hold your notifications in one place and release them for your perusal at the specified time of the day.

We Flip is more of a game than an app, but this should also get the job done pretty much. Basically, you get together a group of your friends and everyone opens the We Flip app at the same time on their phones. The idea is to see who can stay away from their phone the longest. The moment someone is unable to resist the urge to unlock their phone’s screen, the game stops and everyone can see how well they did when it came to resisting the urge to use their phones.

Desert Island is a bit more focused on making your productivity smoother. The app allows you to pick a bunch of the essential apps on your phone, and then wants you to use only those apps—and not get distracted by others. The important thing here is to choose the apps that are genuinely important for you and not every other app in your phone.

The last of the bunch of new apps, at least for the moment, is called Morph. The idea is to tell Morph which apps you usually use at what time of the day. Perhaps the weather and news apps in the morning, emails for a certain time during the day, music streaming apps in the evening and so on. You can also set scenarios through the day, such as work, travel and home. Morph will then try to adapt your phone based on the time of the day to serve apps that you may require at that time. On a holiday? You can relegate the emails and WhatsApp messages where they truly belong—in one dark corner of your phone.