PT, Phone Home, This Time with Data (Premium)

A few weeks back I wrote about some experimentation I was doing with my smartphone and iPad home screens. Since then, I enabled the Screen Time feature in iOS and was curious to see whether my ideas about my actual daily usage matched what I was literally doing.

iPhone

Screen Time feels a bit like a nanny state feature, and an unnecessary one at that, so I had originally disabled it. But for the past three weeks, it’s given me a report each Monday on which apps I use most often and for how long. And that’s useful for this effort. I may keep it enabled going forward, if only to see whether usage changes over time.

One caveat here. I’m in Mexico right now, and that means there are some apps–like Google Maps and Uber–that I use more often now that I do when I’m home. I travel enough that I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing for years. For example, when I fly, I will pin the United Airlines app to my home screen for quick access on the travel day, but then I unpin it when I arrived at my destination. Likewise, I usually have Google Maps on my home screen, but I only pin Uber there when I’m away (work or pleasure). I don’t use it when I’m home in Pennsylvania.

This morning’s Screen Time report on my iPhone pretty much corresponds to my understanding of how I use the device. The five most often used apps, in order, are Messages, Duolingo, Instagram, Facebook, Edge, and Outlook, and each is something I’ve always pinned on the home page. (Edge could be whatever web browser, and I used Gmail, not Outlook, in the past.)

I spend at least 20 to 30 minutes each day in Duolingo, sometimes more, and I suspect that is actually the app I use the most on my iPhone. We used Messages a lot this week because the kids were here, and there were a lot of messages Sunday, the day they flew home. The previous week, my top five apps were Instagram, Duolingo, Camera, Messages, and Facebook, for example. The week before that it was Instagram, Duolingo, Facebook, Camera, and Messages. So there’s a trend of sorts there, I guess. Skewed partially by us being in Mexico, where I do take and share more photos.

But that’s all good. I’ve always pinned all those apps to my home screen. So I at least got that right.

One thing I did change before seeing this report was to move Messages back out to the home screen–I had temporarily put it in a Chat folder to see whether that made a difference–and not just to the home screen, but to the Dock. So now my iPhone home screen layout looks like so.

Ignoring Uber, there are five icons directly available on this home screen, plus the four Dock icons, which are available on all home screens. That said, I only use the one, so there are nine icons, and the top five I use regularly are all accounted for. The others are Google Photos, which I’m surprised never made the top 5, and Google Maps. But I like having those there.

I’ve gone back and forth on folders, in part because I actually like the iPhone’s App Library view and often use it to quickly access often-used by secondary apps like Google Authenticator, Microsoft Authenticator, and Settings. But the Chat, Work, and Play folders all make sense to me, too. So I feel like I’ve worked my way into something that I find usable.

The widgets are a mixed bag. I had originally had two weather widgets up there, one for Macungie and one for Mexico City, but I found the former distracting and just switched to a single weather widget for the current location. I’ve experimented with a few other widgets, but have left it on Google Calendar for now because we’ve had will still have things scheduled while various people are visiting. (We have friends arriving Wednesday.) I’m not 100 percent sold on that, but the at-a-glance thing is reasonably useful.

Pixel

I’m not currently using my Pixel 9 Pro XL day-to-day, but that could change at any time, and I’ve kept it up-to-date, both literally with OS and app updates, and with my iPhone home screen layout. So there’s not much to say here. But because the Pixel already displays the weather in its annoyingly unremovable At a Glance UI, I just added a Google Calendar widget. Which I find ugly.

iPad mini

I didn’t enable Screen Time on my iPad, but I don’t really need to. I use the iPad mostly for reading and for occasional videos, mostly YouTube.

A couple of points here.

There’s more room for widgets, so I’m using several. I can’t say that any are critical, but they’re also not in the way.

I use Gmail on the iPad mini because Outlook mobile, which I prefer on the iPhone, uses a multi-column view that is less than ideal on this small display. Gmail uses a single column display, which looks/works better on the mini.

I put App Store and Settings on the home screen because I find myself accessing them fairly frequently and there’s room. I don’t do this on the iPhone.

All the main apps I use most often, all reading apps, are in the Dock. I’ve found myself really liking Apple News+ lately, for whatever that’s worth. I may kill my newspaper subscriptions and just use that.

After initially putting YouTube in the Play folder, I found that I use it almost every day, usually while shaving, showering, and/or cleaning up and so I pulled it back out onto the home screen where I can access it directly. This is the only notable change since I changed the home screen, I think.

And that’s about it.

So nothing dramatic, per se. But I was mostly interested to see if my understanding of my device usage matched what was really happening. So Screen Time was useful in that regard. The Pixel has a similar feature, under Activity details in Settings > Digital Wellbeing & parental controls, which provides the same data. (I assume other Android versions are similar too.)