Proposal
What is being proposed to be studied and developed in this paper is a software application that is aimed at preventing people from spending too much time on their smartphones, particularly on multimedia sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, among others. There are already numerous apps in the market that offer a similar feature. However, the problem with those applications is the fact that they offer too little flexibility.
Their time-wasting-limiting capability is also limited in that they only serve as an indicator of how much time the users have spent staring at (and using) their smartphones—they lack the active anti-time-wasting feature that the currently proposed application offers. One of the active features of the application (aside from the time counter feature that is abundantly available in other anti-time-wasting applications) is the one that lets the users set how much time they are planning to spend on their smartphones for a specific day.
After reaching that certain amount of time, the smartphone’s screen would automatically black out and they would be forced to put it down and perform other presumably more productive activities such as reading or doing their assignments (for students) for example. Another important feature of the phone is its ability to single out applications that a user wants himself to prevent using.
For example, a user who wants to limit his use of social media would make use of this feature to effectively limit the time he spends on such activities without rendering his phone totally useless. With these features in mind, the application is basically a perfect combination of the active yet very flexible anti-time-wasting features. Moreover, this will be available, at least initially, for Android phone users and so the market for such products would undoubtedly be large, leading to a bigger room for redevelopment and expansion.
