There are people lined up outside the Apple Store on Peachtree right now waiting for the new iPhones, and honestly, good for them, but that's not what I want to write about today. I want to talk about Screen Time, the feature Apple buried in iOS 12 that came out last Monday, because it has been quietly wrecking my week.
I updated the night it dropped, mostly out of habit, not because I cared about "digital wellbeing" or whatever the marketing copy called it. I plugged my phone in, went to bed, woke up, and there it was in Settings the next morning: a little pie chart telling me I'd spent 4 hours and 42 minutes on my phone the day before. Forty-two minutes of that was Twitter. I dont even like Twitter that much anymore, I just open it the way you'd pick at a scab.
The feature itself is simple enough that I dont need six paragraphs to explain it, which is rare for an Apple thing. You get a daily and weekly breakdown by app and by category, you can set App Limits so certain apps get cut off after a set amount of time, and theres a Downtime mode that grays out everything except whatever apps you specifically allow, on a schedule you pick. Sunday mornings you also get a notification with your weekly report, unprompted, whether you want it or not. Mine arrived at 9:14am and I did not want it.
Here's my actual complaint, and its a small one but it annoyed me enough to write about it. I set Downtime to start at 11pm, figuring it'd stop me from doomscrolling Reddit before bed, which, fine, thats the point. But it also grayed out Overcast, my podcast app, which is the literal thing I use to fall asleep every single night. I've done this for probably four years now — some low-stakes tech podcast at low volume, timer set for 30 minutes, lights off. iOS 12 decided that counted as "screen time" I needed protecting from, and I had to go dig through the allowed-apps list at 11:20pm, half asleep already, annoyed, to fix it. Small thing. Still annoyed.
What actually surprised me was the App Limits piece, not because it works well but because of how it made me feel to use it. I set a one-hour limit on Twitter as a kind of experiment. When I hit it around 2pm on Wednesday, the screen just goes gray with a little hourglass icon and an "Ignore Limit" button that gives you one more minute or the rest of the day. I tapped Ignore Limit. Every time. Which tells you something, I guess, though I'm not sure what, other than that a warning screen does not actually stop a habit, it just makes you consciously choose to keep doing the habit, which somehow feels worse.
Part of why Apple built this, if you go back to what they said about it back in June, was the whole "phone addiction" conversation that had been building for a year or two — Google was doing basically the same thing with Digital Wellbeing on the Android side around the same time. Theres also a genuinely nice bit buried in the iOS 12 release notes that has nothing to do with Screen Time: they specifically said this update would make even an iPhone 5s faster, not just the new hardware, which is a weirdly generous thing for a phone company to promise given they make more money when you buy a new one. I dont have a 5s anymore to test it on, but I appreciated the sentiment.
Anyway. My weekly report is going to be rough this Sunday, I already know it, because writing this post alone probably added another forty minutes of screen time that the chart is going to count against me like it's my parole officer. I dont know if I'm going to keep the App Limits on past this week. The Downtime thing, once I fixed the Overcast problem, is actually staying. Everything else is a maybe.