Android smartphones have become terrifyingly effective at keeping people glued to their screens, letting them waste precious time on applications that are deliberately designed to keep the person engaged.
For me. I use the pre-installed Digital Wellbeing app on my Android smartphone to manage my screen time by adding timers to the various doomscrolling apps.
However, to get a quick glance at my screen usage time, I have to go into Digital Wellbeing to get all the relevant information. Fortunately, I have come across an open-source app called “Screen Time” that does just that (and saves time).
Screen Time: Escape The Digital Trap
Written primarily in the Kotlin programming language, Screen Time is the creation of Markus Fisch, who, along with five fellow contributors, has been working on the app to keep it up and running.
It is freely available under The Unlicense license as a no-nonsense way to track screen time on Android. When configured, it will constantly show the screen time for the current day in the notification bar.
Screen Time can also show detailed, summarized views of the screen usage on any given day it was running on.
Even though it doesn't interrupt your smartphone user experience, it can act as a constant reminder of your usage habits, hopefully pushing you to stop scrolling on Instagram at 3 a.m. at night, before a workday. ☠️
Install Screen Time
To do so is quite straightforward; you can either get it from F-Droid or from the Play Store, where you will notice that the storage footprint of Screen Time is very minuscule.
If you are interested in taking a look at the source code or just want to contribute to it, then you should visit its GitHub repo.
Suggested Read 📖
Abhishek Prakash
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