Nir Eyal explains why Apple and Google built Screen Time and Wellbeing into their devices. Customers demanded safer products, much like seatbelts appeared in cars 17 years before they were required by law. Third-party apps pushed the platforms to add these features for free.
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17 years.
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Everybody's iPhone, everybody's Google device today has features that help you use the product less. There's Google well being, there's Apple Screen Time. I use it every day. I limit the time. I have a little timer that comes up if I use a particular app more than I want. These are built in tools. Everybody has them. We just need to use them. And so we have to give these companies credit. Now, why do they do that? Because these type of features make the products better. It's the same exact reason why seatbelts started appearing in cars. Seatbelts first appeared in motor vehicles 17 years before any regulation said that they had to. Why do they do it? Because guess what, people want to drive cars that keep them alive. And so that's exactly what's happening with our technology. There's a whole cottage industry now springing up of products that help us use our devices in a more healthful way. And so what Apple and Google did, they just copied those features and said, wow, lots of people are buying that Screen time app on the App Store. Let's just incorporate into the product automatically. Now everybody gets it for free. That's going to continue happening.
