After years of working to make the smartphone indispensable ― some might even say addictive ― Apple said Monday that it will soon provide an app designed to help people step away from the iPhone.
The new feature, called Screen Time, will allow parents to monitor the amount of time their children spend on specific apps and to set limits on iPhones and iPads.
“Apps beg us to use our phone when we should be doing something else,” Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software engineering, said at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Jose, California. “Some of us, we might not recognize how distracted we’ve become.”
Earlier this year, two large Apple shareholders asked the company to do more to help parents prevent their children from becoming addicted to digital devices, NPR reported. Together, the California teachers’ pension fund and the Jana Partners investment group own more than $2 billion in Apple stock.
The organizations asked Apple’s board of directors to provide parents options beyond a “binary” system in which tools and functions are either freely available or closed off.
Screen Time will offer daily and weekly activity reports that reveal the amount of time spent in individual apps and how often a device is picked up, among other things, USA Today said.
“It empowers you with insight and control,” Federighi said.
The feature will be included in iOS12, which is expected to be rolled out later this year.
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