Usage Breaker

Be more mindful about your phone use with the Usage Breaker and reduce unwanted use.

How it works

The Usage Breaker is available on all devices running Android 9 or higher.

Select apps

To turn on the Usage Breaker, go to Niagara settings > Features > Usage Breaker and select all apps you use more or for longer than you'd like. You should select apps that make you feel bad after using them or ones you get stuck on for long periods.

If you are still unsure which apps to add, these are good candidates according to the results of our Digital Wellbeing Initiative: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube.

Get gentle reminders

When you use one of your selected apps, you will get a notification every few minutes to remind you to think about whether you want to continue using the app right now. This helps you not get sucked into endless scrolling and lets you be more mindful of phone usage.

These reminders will appear after 5, 10, 20, 30, 45, 60, 90, 120, 180, and 240 minutes of using the same app to ensure you do not get stuck but aren't annoyed by frequent notifications. Short breaks, like checking a message or a quick web search, will not interrupt this timer to make app session durations more accurate.

Why not block access to apps?

App timers, like the one built into Android, are a common digital well-being feature aiming to reduce phone usage. They allow users to set a daily limit of time per app. When this limit is reached, access to the app is blocked.

At first glance, this sounds like a good solution, but these app timers need to differentiate between wanted and unwanted phone use. This means you might watch a long work-related tutorial on YouTube and use up your daily time, which blocks you from relaxing with some entertaining videos in the evening. The time spent on the video was productive and should not punish you later in the day.

Also, sometimes you really want to finish that one video, but the app timer cuts you off. In those situations, you can cheat the timer by adding more time for today, but that's a slippery slope. You start forming a habit of cheating the timer, and you get really good at working around the time limit, making the app timer useless.

Many of our Digital Wellbeing Initiative participants also reported being unsatisfied with app timers as a solution for reducing unwanted phone usage.

This is why the Usage Breaker does not suspend your apps but instead builds awareness of your time on specific apps and whether you are happy with that time.