Moment
Moment, an app that launched Friday, automatically tracks your daily iPhone use and warns you - with your choice of reminder sounds with five "relaxing" and five "intense" notifications - when you're on it for too long.
Moment is an invisible app. Once you set it up, you never have to open it again.
It also has the opt-in option to track where you go during the day and plot it on a map, in case you're curious about that. But be warned: Running the GPS in your phone's background can definitely kill your battery.
Moment's developer Kevin Holesh said he realized his "addiction" to his iPhone was a problem about six months ago. At the end of the day, both he and his fiancé spent more time with their devices than with each other.
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To solve his problem, Holesh created Moment to help him "find a balance of connected and disconnected" that worked for him.
When he started using the app, Holesh was spending 75 minutes a day on his phone; now he's down to 40.
"After 40 minutes on my iPhone for the day, I get an annoying buzzer telling me to look away from the glowing box in my hands," he said in a blog post.
Holesh says he's made improvements, but he still hasn't kicked the habit. "As I wrote this article, I checked Facebook twice, answered a text, and checked a news site," he said.
Technology has been proven to ruin your sleep cycle. In South Korea, teens are so addicted to their smartphones that the government staged interventions, placing addiction experts in classrooms and enforcing curfews for gamers. And San Francisco's techies are going to "digital detox camps" to stave off their Internet addictions. Apps like Moment could at least help make smartphone users aware of how much time they spend on their devices.