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 …
