Hi! I’d like to be able to completely disable social stuff, leaderboards and comparisons with others in your app.
In my case, less screen time is not always good: I read on my phone, run with an active screen with stopwatch, etc. And in reports and leaderboards I see messages, sometimes in red colour, that I did worse than other people. So, with current implementation, the app pushes me to do less productive activities to get less screen time.
Or, as another solution, would be okay if apps could be labeled as non-counting towards overall screen time, so I can e.g. mark my reading app as such, and read a couple of hours per day without making my stats look worse doing so.
Thanks for the feature requests! I’ve passed this thoughtful feedback along to our engineers to consider as we continue to upgrade the app, as we’re currently improving our social features and trying to give more options to our Gems. Otherwise, we do have some changes coming to screen time that you’ll likely be happy with, so stay tuned!
I’ve actually had the same problems, you see I read a lot of audio books, I also use texting as my primary communication tool, I use medical apps to keep track of symptoms, I also read articles and use a special reading app to help me do homework as I am still in school and have trouble processing information when presented visually, because I use my phone for so many productive and necessary things, it’s hard for me to use it less. I think the ideas presented here would also greatly help me.
I too want the option to disable social comparisons and hide the leaderboard menu… I want to better myself; it doesn’t feel good to do better or worse than someone else. Thanks, Opal
Can it compare me to my past like Apple Health does? I still want a comparison but not to people whose walks of life I don’t know. This would be the perfect compromise.
Happy to help and am just following up on this thread as I realize I previously failed to. There are two ways to disconnect from the social elements of this app.
First up, you are more than welcome to remove anyone who is following you by going to your “Profile” tab - “Settings” (accessible from the gear icon in the top right corner) - “Friends” - and then press the “…” next to each friend and click “Stop Sharing.” That way, your screen time will no longer be shared with them!
Your second option is to head to your phone Settings, and then scroll down to Opal. From there, toggle to “off” beside “Contacts” in the “Allow Opal to Access” section.