Google Digital Wellbeing Exits Beta
- Paul Thurrott
- Nov 14, 2018
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Following a three-month-long beta period, Google this week quietly updated its Digital Wellbeing app for Android 9 Pie to 1.0.
“Digital Wellbeing Beta is a new set of features aimed at giving you a complete picture of your digital habits and helping you disconnect when you want to,” the Beta enrollment page notes. That beta required a Google Pixel handset running Android 9 Pie. But the 1.0 release should be available to any Pixel or Android One handset running this release.
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Google announced that Digital Wellbeing would be included with Android 9 Pie back in May at Google I/O. But it was tested and released separately from the platform. Google issued the first beta release in early August. And in my own testing of this app—which was available inside of Android Settings only at the time—I found it to be roughly analogous to similar features in the latest iOS version.
With this week’s release of the 1.0 version, the prominent “Beta” logo disappeared from the top right of the app. And it picked up some new features, too. You can now add a Digital Wellbeing icon to your app list so you can pin it to a home screen and access it more easily, add a new Grayscale tile to Quick Settings so you can toggle that feature on the fly, and access your Night Light schedule from within the app more easily. Google also made some minor visual improvements to the Digital Wellbeing dashboard.
Digital Wellbeing is freely available for compatible handsets from the Google Play Store.