About a year and a half ago, a friend of mine told me about an app she’d downloaded to help curb her smartphone use. 

“It turns on a camera, and watches me, and I have to do either push-ups or squats for every minute of free use of the apps that I've chosen to lock,” said Hannah Palma, a 31-year-old software engineer. 

The app is called Clearspace. You can tell it how much you want to use distracting apps and it will prompt you to do an exercise or take a deep breath each time you open them. Oh — and it costs $49.99 a year. 

“I realize it’s kind of silly that I’m paying monthly for my phone and then I'm paying yearly to not use it, but I think that's the best way that I've stayed healthy in managing my screen time,” Palma said.

Clearspace is just one of dozens of companies that have popped up in recent years that are in the business of screentime reduction. Market researchers have estimated that the so-called digital detox industry could swell to $19.44 billion by 2032. 

It includes apps like ScreenZen and One Sec, which force you to take a pause before using social media. Others, such as BePresent, allow you to add friends and earn rewards and some have even more gamified features, like the Forest app, in which users plant and grow a virtual “tree” by abstaining from distractions.

After hearing Hannah talk about Clearspace, I signed up too. For a while, it kinda worked. I found that just taking a pause before opening TikTok at least helped me become more conscious of my scrolling. Like a lot of these apps, it has a dashboard where I could track my progress.

“It's fascinating, isn't it? Don't use your phone, but like, come to this dashboard, which will show you how much you've not used your phone,” said Zoetanya Sujon, a reader and program director in communications and social technologies at the London College of Communication.

She says those gamified features, including stats tracking, streaks, and the ability to add friends, are the same techniques that social media companies use to make their platforms so sticky in the first place.

“These apps are trying to give people, well, weirdly, using the same systems and tools to try to give people a sense of control over very pervasive interfaces and technologies,” said Sujon. 

Some startups, including Brick, Bloom, and Blok — yes, that’s three separate companies — sell physical devices that restrict apps when you tap your phone to them. They’re priced between $30 and $60, sometimes with an additional monthly subscription fee.

“I've used all of them — the lockbox phone case, Brick, Freedom software, like lots of different things,” said Benjamin Goldhirsh, co-founder of another mental health tech company called Matter Neuroscience.  “I think the challenge is the magnetism of the phone is strong, and the functional use of the phone is strong.” 

To get around that, Goldhirsh developed his own, home-made screen-limiting solution, which he (somewhat jokingly) refers to as “the staff of destiny.”

It’s a big walking stick — he picked it up while camping in Alaska — that he screwed a phone case into. “It was super embarrassing to walk through the airport with your phone on a stick,” he said. “But it did have kind of a wizard vibe?”

The stick is designed to make scrolling inconvenient. And with that same idea, Goldhirsh’s company is now raising money to develop a six-pound phone case, priced $209.15.

Now, it is possible that the idea of spending that much money on a phone case or $50 on an app that’s designed to make the expensive smartphone you have less functional makes you want to scream.   

“Yes, it is crazy,” said Sujon. “But the thing I think the most is that being chronically online and deeply engaged with your phone is not like a personal fault — we are using these technologies the way they are designed to.”

In the absence of systemic change to the way these technologies are designed and incorporated into our lives, Sujon suggested thinking about why screentime reduction matters to you and helping that guide your solution. “I would say, think about your life,” she said. “Because it might not so much be about using your phone less, it might be like, maybe you want to see people more.”

When I checked in with Hannah a few weeks ago it was clear she’d been a lot more dedicated to her screen limits than I have. She had a 74-day “streak” of hitting app usage goals. Mine was three days. 

So, she invited me to join a “challenge” where we could compare our streaks and do exercises (squats) to earn more. This gamified strategy is straight from Big Tech’s playbook but seeing that Hannah was scrolling (and squatting) about as much as I was did make me feel a little bit closer to my friend, IRL.