this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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I’ve never found Screen Time all that useful, for the same reason as the article - it can’t distinguish good usage from bad usage. Screen Time only counts time - but it can’t tell which minutes is doomscrolling and which are used more positively.
Maybe that’s an application for Apple Intelligence, although there would be some pretty big privacy issues there.
Screen Time is also not helped by only working on Apple devices. It can’t account for time spent using using non Apple devices like TVs, consoles, PCs with other operating systems etc. it might have been more useful if there was an external API screen time software for other platforms could report to.
Apple has to keep it generic or the software providers will have a fit. It cannot start making judgments that 9 hours of Facebook is bad, or Meta would throw a fit.
And Apple will never just let users decide that. They consider it anti-user to force us to make choices.
Apple lets you set app, category (“Social” is a category), and website-specific limits, though, so you can absolutely make that choice.
Can you control which categories count toward screen time? If so I take it back.
Yes - you can set multiple daily limits (they reset at midnight and that can’t be changed), and each one can apply to one or more apps, categories, or websites. You can also select almost all the apps in a category and omit a couple, but then future apps in that category won’t be limited automatically. And you can choose specific apps to never be limited.
So you could set a 3 hour limit for Social apps, Games, a couple individually chosen other apps, and some specific websites, as well as a 5 minute limit toward the Facebook app and facebook.com, if you wanted.
If you mean the screen time tracking, then I don’t know think you can do that, but it gives you both your overall time as well as breakdowns by category (at least the top few categories), so you can do the math on your own.
I think it’s still important to measure “good usage,” because whether you really need to shop for that dress or not, it’s still sedentary time and that affects your body.
But it does seem like they could do a better job of knowing when you are actually sitting still looking at the screen. Google maps time while driving shouldn’t count for anything at all.