DIGITAL LIFE

Tim Cook worried about smartphone addiction
Tim Cook, Apple's current CEO, is of the opinion that people spend too much time on the phone. The head of the technology giant was present at the TIME 100 Summit to discuss the additive nature of mobile devices and his company's role in the phenomenon, and said that it was never Apple's intention to make users constantly focused on the iPhone. Very recently, he himself made a point of silencing the notifications of his telephone.
"Apple never wanted to amplify the time it takes to use the phone," Cook said. In the international press, the statement resonated, especially when it is issued by the CEO of a company that has designed a platform that allows developers to fine-tune their apps to be in permanent contact with users, "whether there is a new promotion on a product or for a new level that was added to a game, "as TechCrunch wrote.
When we look at the nature of the notification platform, we easily realize that it is in contrast to Cook's claim. In practice, it allows programmers to actively and successively capture users' attention through strategically designed notifications to get them to open their app. A possible alternative to this system, suggests the same site, could include a notification scheduling system, which would only issue them and only when the user requested them. And if that did not work, it would not be difficult either to idealize an alternative version with urgent notifications and other non-priority ones, where categorization would serve exactly to define what kind of content would have enough weight to vibrate the phone, turn on the screen and emit a sound , or, on the other hand, only appear in the notification zone without "calling" the user with any type of signal.
Currently, Apple does not appear to have plans to substantially alter the current system. Instead, the company offers a more drastic option, which does not allow for a large personal adjustment to the app's authorizations. We're talking about completely shutting down the push notifications system, as Cook assumes he's done so very recently. "If you have not already done so, I advise you to do so - turn your notifications on," said the CEO. "What I did was cut the number of notifications I received every day," he said. "I asked myself, 'Do I really need to get thousands of notifications a day?' It's not something that is bringing value to my life or making me a better person, "he said. Note that this notification system was one of the biggest selling points of the iPhone in 2008. In fact, the fact that an app can reach the user to communicate news in real time, without it having to remember to open the to see if there were new things to see or not, it was a new idea and in theory with the potential to save consumers time. However, the appropriation of the system was almost exclusively commercial, opening the door to a kind of "psychological abuse" that manipulates the user with a sometimes useless sequence of notifications. As a result, the users were quickly grabbed for their phones so that the news would fall directly into their hands. The so-called "fear of missing out" was created, which can be viciously translated into "fear of being left out", in this case, of the new content that was emerging in your apps.
A decade after the first iPhone, Apple decided to create a first set of tools so that users could begin to control, even partially, their notifications. These were announced in WWDC 2018 and, in addition to allowing a "notification pipeline" to be muted, also include a couple of other features such as parental controls for younger users and an accountant that records the time we spend on the phone.
"Whenever we get on the phone, it means we're diverting our attention from the things we're working with, the people we're talking to, right?" Cook said. "And if we look at our phones, more time than we look at a person in the eye, it's because we're doing the wrong thing," he continued. "We want to educate people in this field, we have to improve this process over time, just like everything else we do, we will innovate in this area, as we do in the others."
"But in summary, we do not want people to be constantly using their phone. That was never our goal," Tim Cook said. Mundophone