iOS 12 and digital well-being: screen time reports, app limits, grouped notifications & more

iOS 12’s digital well-being features came to light at Worldwide Developers Conference, where Apple just unveiled a new set of comprehensive built-in tools to help iPhone and iPad customers limit distraction and understand how they’re spending time with their devices.

Here are the key updates:

  • Do Not Disturb—A new mode, Do Not Disturb During Bedtime does just that, silencing all notifications in the night. And when you wake up in the morning, you can tap as soon as you’re ready to start confronting those alerts. iOS’s scheduled Do Not Disturb mode is now even more finely tuned thanks to the ability to set the precise time or location (‘When I get back home,’ or ‘When I leave the cinema,’ for instance) when scheduled DND should automatically shut off.
  • Easer notification tuning—In iOS 12, like on Android, pressing a notification on the Lock or Home screen now also gets you additional options and shortcuts. These let you, for instance, turn off notifications for an app without having to go to Settings. Siri will even let you know if you’re receiving notifications from apps that you long deleted. And with notification grouping, multiple notifications from the same app can now be bundled together so they take less space.
  • Screen time—An all-new feature in iOS 12, this feature helps you get a better understanding of what you do with your device day in, day out. With weekly reports, you get deep insight into the apps you use most often during the day or night, with handy summaries of the time spent in specific apps. Moreover, you’ll get detailed stats like how often per hour you’ve picked up your phone, what drew you in, which apps send you the most notifications and so forth.
  • App limits—iOS 12 will permit parents to set a limit for each app, yet another long requested feature. Their junior can use the app until he or she receives a notification informing them they’ve just reached their daily app limit. These limits apply toward a user’s total usage because they sync across all of their devices via iCloud.
  • Allowances— With Allowances, parents can impose additional restrictions on their kids’ smartphone usage, and can even do that remotely from their own device. Parents can define downtime for kids, limit the total time they’re allowed to spend in individual apps or app categories, like games. Certain critical apps can be whitelisted so they’re always allowed, like Phone, Contacts, Find My iPhone, educational apps and more. Like before, parents can limit access to movies, websites and apps with age-appropriate content, but more finely-tuned than before.

And that concludes a quick overview of iOS 12’s most important digital well-being features.

Subscribe to iDownloadBlog on YouTube

Which of these is your favorite, and why?

Let us know in the comments!