Apple's screen time report has become a Sunday guilt trip tradition.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carrino.

Today we're revisiting an episode from earlier this year about a feature that's become a regular part of the Apple iPhone experience.

Six years ago, Apple introduced the Screen Time Report.

Users of iPhones and iPads get a notification every Sunday, informing them with a handy graph,

just as they're trying to relax before a stressful week, that they have once again failed to reduce

their phone time. The feature promised to empower users to manage their device time and balance the things that are really important.

But is it actually doing that?

Caroline Mims Nice, a staff writer at The Atlantic, recently wrote it sometimes feels like the screen time report is doing more guilt-tripping than empowering these days.

Time is just sort of a weird way to measure our relationship with our devices.

We have these sort of magical smartphones that come with a lot of utility, but they also come

with a lot of distraction.

So figuring out how to regulate that is not just a question

of time, but actually one of really thinking and being thoughtful about what are the positive

and the negative use cases of a phone? How does it make me feel? And that actually matters a lot

when we're talking about health outcomes.

Yeah, the addition of this feature seems to be kind of an admission by Apple that they know

that there can be some, you know, negative effects of being on your phone too much. And they wanted

to allow users to, quote, take control of the time they spend on their

devices. Does this actually do that? You know, Apple, a spokesperson for Apple did not respond to my

question about whether or not they have any evidence that screen time helps people reduce the time

spent on their phone. So it's sort of unclear.

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