News Investigation

Why Beating Your Phone Addiction May Come at a Cost

Mar 2019 🇺🇸 The Guardian

In this Guardian feature on the 'digital wellness' industry, journalist Oscar Schwartz examines apps and programs marketed as fixes for smartphone overuse and profiles Tim Kendall, hired the previous year as CEO of Moment, a screen-time tracking app. Kendall tells Schwartz he sees digital wellness as a growth market comparable to meditation apps, and describes Moment's move toward paid, data-driven coaching meant to help users cut down on pickups and notifications. The piece sets Kendall's business alongside critics who argue that placing responsibility on individual users lets platform companies avoid addressing the engagement-driven design choices behind heavy use in the first place. TechKids Foundation includes this piece as a documented, quoted account of Kendall's own reasoning as a founder building consumer screen-time tools, set inside broader reporting that questions whether such tools solve the underlying problem.

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CITATION

Schwartz, Oscar. "Why Beating Your Phone Addiction May Come at a Cost." The Guardian, March 13, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/13/digital-wellness-phone-addiction-tech

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