Android Goes Offensive in Battling Tech Addiction

Android, on August 6, 2018, unveiled its latest operating system, the Android 9 Pie to join the fight against tech addiction.

Social welfare organizations and the general public are getting increasingly conscious about the hazards of technological overuse. Combined, they are now asking technological behemoths to incorporate changes that help avoid the misuse of technology.

This trend has been all the rage in the news currently. With prominent organizations propagating the occurrence of psychological problems due to technological misuse,  digital businesses are finally listening.

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Facebook and Instagram are already making the expected changes in their flagship products.

The latest though is Google! Google has released a whole new operating system (OS) to fight the tech addiction. They are calling this OS as the Android 9 Pie. Google is positive that the Android 9 Pie will be capable to tackle all the issues raised about social well being.

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A Smarter Way to Control Mobile Phone Use

Google released a featured they like to call,’ The Social Well Being feature’ in their latest operating system release. This feature enables Smartphone users to track the amount of time that they have been spending looking at the screen.

A user can obtain a break up of the number of hours spent on individual applications. Hence, as an example, users are equipped to check if they have been spending too much time on, say, Tinder.

Extending this feature, Google has provisioned users with a dashboard on which they can see spent hours. Also, users have access to timers that they can use to manage application usage.

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For highly addictive applications, Smartphone users can assign a certain number of usage hours to avoid overuse. The way this works is that after reaching the set time limit, the selected application icon greys out and locks.

Another promising feature that Google is launching is the ‘Wind-Down-Mode’ feature. This feature changes the phone’s display to greyscale at a pre-determined time. The feature also changes the phone’s status to Do Not Disturb.

Google intends to encourage users to put down their phones in order to restrain misuse.

Both the features are in the testing phase and are, currently, only available on Google’s Pixel line of phones. The same applies to the operating system as well.

Google will release this operating system for other brands sometime this year.

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Changing Marketing Scopes

Considering that many large corporations are getting involved in curbing digital media use, marketers would need to evolve. Marketing and Advertising campaigns would need to be far more targeted than now.

Marketers would really need to think of newer ways to campaign. Ideally, such campaigns should be rolled out with an integrated message that supports the ‘digital media overuse’ cause.

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This will be difficult but is the need of the hour. Content creators would need to craft excellent content that provides value to its readers. This applies to content across the entire marketing paradigm.

Overuse of Social and Digital Media platforms are being strongly red flagged as a major social problem. As such marketing scopes in the future will need to revolve around this sentiment.

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