Category Apps

You aren’t the only one who is spending most of your time hooked on social media and your latest smartphone.  Do you think perhaps you can’t cut them out of your life completely, but here I have some tips to help you take back control of your smartphone, your social media usage, and your life.

How often do you switch on your smartphone, and in a jiffy discover having lost 30 minutes of your valuable time, or perhaps your whole day? Time is the most important resource at your disposal, and once you lose it, you shall never get it back. 

We don’t realize how easy it is to get lost in our mobile screens as we tap from one app to another, and scroll through social feeds on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Connected India account. The latest smartphones and social media apps are designed to hook, and keep you continuously engaged, and in some cases can even lead to addiction. But there are ways to insulate your mind from all these distractions, and take back control of your tech.

Here comes some tips to wean yourself away from compulsive smartphone and social media habits, and how to regain control over consuming the technology.

It’s Time to Change Notification Settings

I won’t be surprised if your push notifications are still set to defaults. You may be getting bombarded by emails, messages, alerts from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and dozens of other apps? Cut out the clutter.

Check your notification settings on all your devices—smartphones, desktops, tablets, and laptops—and turn everything off that’s not essential. Notifications that appear as red dots next to your app icons are visual cues literally begging you to check them. The golden rule is to turn off all notifications except for direct messages and mentions because these are the ones coming from real users.

Use Original Android and iOS Apps

Smartphone makers and app developers have begun to respond to the tech addiction backlash from users. For iPhone users, now the iOS12 has a built-in feature called Screen Time, that not only tracks your screen time and app usage, but helps you schedule limits and “Downtime” away from selected apps and alerts. This is the way you should use it.

In case you’re running the latest version of Android, you can do the same with Google’s Digital Wellbeing app. This provides you a dashboard that breaks down your app usage, how often you normally unlock your phone, and on an average, how many notifications you receive. You can go ahead and set your app limits and turn off unnecessary notifications.

Monitoring Your App Usage

While you are busy using tech and social media, it can often create a sense of illusion about how much time you’ve spent looking at the screen. The remedy lies in monitoring your usage time from app to app. This is a great way to identify behaviors that you wish to change. Although there are built-in functionality such as iOS Screen Time and Android’s Digital Wellbeing, there are also apps like Moment for iOS and Rescue Time for Mac and Windows that help you keep a check on how much time you’re spending on apps and devices besides using your smartphone for other functions.

Grayscale

According to the Center for Humane Technology (CHT), the colored icons reward our brains every time we unlock them. Set your phone to grayscale to convince your mind to check your phone less frequently.

If you are using an iOS device, go to Settings > General > Accessibility and scroll down to Accessibility Shortcut. Now, if you check the Color Filters option, it will unlock a feature allowing you to tap the side button thrice or home button to switch grayscale on or off on your IPhone.

On Android phones, the process may differ, but you can check under Settings > About phone. With Digital Wellbeing present in the Android Pie, apps turn gray when you’ve reached your daily limit.

Don’t Use Your Phone as an Alarm Clock

You shouldn’t keep your smartphone within easy reach during the night. Don’t put it for charging on your nightstand, and if your phone needs to be charged, keep your phone further away from your bed or ideally leave it in another room so you’re not tempted to pick it up in the middle of the night. Get a separate alarm clock so your wake-up cycle isn’t tied to your smartphone.

Fix Social Boundaries

We need a lot of social etiquettes while using technology in a responsible manner. You must know when is it appropriate to use your smartphone, and when is it considered rude? If you’re having a one-to-one conversation with someone, resist the urge to pull a device, because it’s the first step toward cutting out unhealthy behavior. Make a rule to not keep devices on your dining table during meals. There may be small kids at the table who don’t have their own devices yet, and you will be setting a bad precedent if you’re scrolling through your Instagram posts in one hand, while eating with the other, and barely participating in the conversation.

Take Care of Distractions 

There are many apps out there that help you focus and cut out your digital distractions. An app called Thrive puts users into Thrive Mode and subsequently blocks all apps, calls, notifications, and texts except for “VIPs” you’ve previously designated. There are meditation apps like Calm and Headspace that help you to de-stress and focus your energy on positive activities. You can use an app like freedom that blocks apps and websites for a given period of time. You can use gamification to motivate yourself.

You can also use extensions that help you use sites like Facebook and YouTube in a more structured manner. You can choose Distraction Free YouTube feature that can easily remove recommended videos from sidebars to keep you from getting unnecessarily engaged. Besides, tools like News Feed Eradicator masks Facebook posts for those users who normally use the app only for seeing events and groups. Moreover, the Facebook Demetricator extension can hide even likes, comments, and share numbers to keep you away from fixating on feedback and rewards cycles.

Digital revolution has redefined the future of our industries, society, and economy as a whole. New technologies and innovative mobile apps have been significantly changing the way we work and live today. Mobility is fast becoming essential for every application and digital product that organizations offer. Companies are now adopting the mobile first approach to remain ahead of their competitors. Every organization is planning to connect to a larger audience through an intuitive app that runs without glitch on multiple mobile platforms.

However, with so much diversity in devices, platforms, versions, operating systems, companies are clueless whether to choose a cross-platform app or a native app. This has always been a challenge for most developers and companies to find the best development approach as there are advantages and disadvantages with both approaches.

Presently, the mobile marketplace is widely fragmented due to the presence of different devices with a variety of interfaces, languages, and SDKs. It’s a herculean task for organizations to develop a versatile app that can run on multi platforms. Therefore, the concept of cross-platform mobile app is fast gaining currency as it allows the developer to code once and deploy app across various platforms. 

Some developers prefer a native app while others believe that developing a cross-platform app makes more sense. But it cannot be denied that developing a cross-platform app has more potential to tap the greater market. A multi platform app allows the developers to create an application using a single language for scripting that includes CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. It also increases productivity and motivates developers to come up with a high quality app that works equally well on iOS, Android or Windows device.

Advantages of developing a cross-platform mobile app?

• Reusable code: The development of cross-platform mobile app simplifies the task of maintaining and deploying codes and also eliminates repetitive tasks. Developers can easily reuse the codes for other platforms instead of writing a new code for specific task or action.
• Saving cost: It is far economical for companies to build a cross-platform mobile app and leverages a single codebase. They do not need to invest a fortune to get an app and also the same developers can be leveraged to work on various platforms, instead of having a dedicated team for each platform like we get in the current native scene.
• Easier to market: Cross-platform app development framework leverages the unified codebase that enables businesses to fast track the mobile application development and timely delivery of the app for its customers.
• Easier to deploy: Most apps offer a modules and extension that seamlessly integrate with other tools to improve its functionality and appearance. It is relatively easier for the developers to deploy and maintain codes for apps to run across all platforms. Moreover, the latest updates allows app to get easily synced across multiple devices and platforms.
• Consistency: One of the most important qualities for any app is its User Experience (UX). The single codebase used to develop a multi-platform app helps in maintaining the overall look and feel and consistency of the app on most platforms.

Popular Approaches of developing App

One of the major issues that developers encounter while working on a mobile app is the different models of mobile phones that need to be supported. Despite the fact that the most popular platform for apps supports android, it’s no longer enough.  Window and iOS are worthy competitors, and the iPad presents different options and possibilities that often require developing their own app experiences. To make a mobile app truly dynamic, you need to support every platform that users normally use. 

Currently, we lack the technology to create an app that magically works on most platforms and on all mobile devices. Though, developers are working hard to achieve this milestone, it will take some time. Meanwhile, there are two popular approaches that are currently adopted.

In the first approach, a driver is provided for each phone that gives access to, accelerometer and GPS from by using languages such as JavaScript, Ruby and Python. Through this approach, a developer can write the app in a scripting language along with HTML and CSS that can be easily run on phones that is equipped with the driver.

The second approach is to first write the app in one language and subsequently get it translated to other languages that are compatible with other phones. This helps a developer to create the app, say for the android devices and run it through a tool to produce versions that could run on other platforms.

There are other ways to develop an app through HTML5, which is an advanced version of HTML that could provide direct APIs to GPS and other mobile-specific features. But the problem with HTML5 is that its standard is yet to be finalised and there are not many devices supporting it. However, an app could be still created by using this method that can run on all phones as well as support most.

Pros and Cons

There are both positives and negatives about the current and future options. The main advantages of using such technologies lies in easy marketing and maintenance of a single app instead of doing it for multiple apps.

Other advantages are uniformity of look and feel across different devices, support for flexible layout and use of existing technologies. Great mobile developers are rarity but it is relatively easier to find web developers who are familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby, Python or other scripting languages.

The major disadvantage, apart from not supporting every platform, is the limitation of what driver or translator is able to handle. You may not be able to access local storage, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or something similar that may not be available on most phones. Then there are issues like performance because the code that is either translated or written in a script language needs to be interpreted, and may not be optimized for a given phone.

The multi-platform development approach is a widely accepted across the world since it makes the entire development process agile. Before taking a decision whether the multi-platform approach is the right strategy, it is important for companies to understand the users’ needs. The smartest approach should be to study and analyze various parameters such as customer types, diverse mobile devices, range of supported platforms, and customers’ interaction with apps, etc. to find out whether a cross-platform solution is the right choice.