Of the more than seven billion people on earth there are some 2.5 billion smartphone users
and the mobile app market tops more than 100 billion dollars a year with a market that large
app companies have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into keeping people as gripped to their
phones for as long as possible but how do they do that and how can you escape their clutches
are we addicted to smartphones well the problem is our devices are designed to keep us engaged
they're intentionally addicting but if you understand the tricks that grab your attention you
can learn to control your phone instead of having it control you so how does this addiction work it
starts with notifications they used to signal when another person was trying to communicate with you
like a friend sending you a text when you get a call a text or a message it's usually because
another person wants to communicate with you but a lot of today's apps simulate the feeling of that
kind of social interaction to get you to spend more time on their platform apps like facebook
and instagram will tell you when friends post send suggestions for who to friend or tell you when a
lot of friends are going to an event by doing this they simulate human interaction and pull you onto
their platform but notifications weren't always this malicious when they were first introduced for
email on blackberries back in 2003 they were meant to be a way to check your phone less not more
if you got a message whenever someone emailed you you wouldn't have to keep checking your email
every hour to see if you got a new message letting you spend less time on your device
but developers quickly realized how they could use these notifications to use people's time
rather than save it a perfect example are games like candy crush or clash royale in clash royale
you battle other people using your choice of 8 cards from a list of about 100 and you get these
cards from unlocking time chests it works the way a lot of free apps work these days a chess will
take 3 or 8 or 12 hours to unlock and they use these chests to send you constant notifications
trying to get you back on the app for starters every time a chess unlocks every few hours
boom a notification on top of that they have daily and weekly quests that send you their own
notifications and if a friend wants a battle bam more notifications having the game installed on
your phone you can easily get in the double digits of notifications every day and that's just from
one app if you replace chess with harvest times you've got farmville replace it with swipes and
now you've got dating apps it's a cookie cutter formula and the specifics can be swapped out for
different apps and these notifications can be personalized with what you're most interested in
an example android users may be familiar with is the recent rollout of automatic news notifications
without having a news app downloaded at first they're pretty random but by seeing which stories
you open versus what you swipe off and what stories you read for longer your phone can quickly
learn what you're interested in and provide content that appeals more to you so if you're
into the latest celebrity gossip you'll start getting stories about that financial news mow
your speed well you'll get notifications for these stories instead all personalized to your interests
that's the secret of how these notifications succeed the average person gets over 45 a day but
you probably didn't notice that that's because if an app sends you a ton of annoying notifications
you're probably gonna turn them off or even delete the app and that's no good for the companies that
make them so they play a delicate cat and mouse game trying to send you as many notifications
as possible keeping you on their platform without sending you so many that you want to
do something about it games like clash royale manage this by having adjusting notifications
if you click on every notification in a day and play a lot they'll continue to send you
notifications throughout the day but once you swipe off on a few of them they'll cool off for
a while until they think you might be in the mood again content libraries like youtube and netflix
that have treasure troves of content far more than anyone could ever consume have had to master the
art of selective recommendations apart from push notifications there are subtle features keeping
you glued to your screens most apps use these bright contrasting colors to catch your eyes
and many have taken cues on keeping people hooked from casinos like the use of slot machines to
unlock items and games it's no coincidence that the current fourth top grossing game is literally
a slots game so armed with this knowledge is there anything you can do to free yourself from the
clutches of your phone well for starters you can turn off notifications that don't come from people
that way you get pulled into your phone less often another thing you can do is greyscale your screen
the easiest way for these apps to attract your eyes attention is through colors
in eye tracking tests humans tend to gravitate towards these bright and poppy colors
it's also why notification bubbles are often red or blue the little icon like this or this doesn't
have the same impact on your attention as this so you can neutralize that distracting effect by
selecting a grayscale color filter in your phone's accessibility settings finally you can restrict
your main screen to everyday tools make sure that when you unlock your home screen it doesn't have
anything except the in the moment tools that help you live your life these are things like rideshare
services maps calendars and communications apps that you can't fall into a bottomless pit
of content on for hours at a time research shows that people rely on visual cues more than internal
cues to stop consuming something in a 2005 study individuals who ate soup out of a self-fulfilling
bowl ate 73 percent more than those great out of a normal bowl filled by servers but those who ate
from the self-refilling bowls didn't feel any more satisfied these apps work the same way youtube and
reddit never have an endpoint so you can easily get stuck in them so you want to design your home
screen to avoid these distractions if you liked the video be sure to let us know in the comment
section down below it really helps the analytics on a smaller channels and don't forget to
subscribe so you never miss an upload have a great day and remember there is always more to learn
you