Google rolled out the Android 9.0 Pie version on its Google Pixel devices among other devices earlier this month. Android Pie is trying out a feature ‘digital wellbeing’ that deals with calculating the time spent on each app so that users can analyze their usage and limit it in order to curb addiction of smartphones. Google is extending the digital wellbeing feature to YouTube which is the largest video-streaming website/app streamed by billions of users every day.
The feature calculates the time spent on YouTube across all the paired devices where you have used the same Google account to sign-in and clubs the data for YouTube, YouTube Music, and YouTube TV and is accessed simply by tapping on the Settings and then, select ‘Time watched’.
When I tried the feature, it shows how much time I spent on YouTube today, yesterday, last week, and clubs an average daily usage as well so that you can know exactly how much time you spent on YouTube on a daily basis. Apart from counting the time spent, the feature has an option to remind the user to take a break from YouTube as well as a feature to autoplay next video so that the fun never stops and neither the time counter.
Scroll further and you get the option to snooze all the notification especially during the night time because YouTube has changed how it sends notification and now allows notification only if the user has explicitly ‘hit the notification button’ which sounds too familiar, isn’t it? The user gets an option to check out a digest of all the notifications which tends to club all the recently uploaded window on a single screen.
As of now, the feature works online only as I wasn’t able to track time watched when the internet was turned off. Also, it tends to track time for a single account that is if you have multiple channels, the time watched will not be credited from channel 1 to channel 2. It doesn’t count the offline videos watched either so now, you have the option to download offline videos and watch it offline if you want to keep the counter static.
The feature is limited to the app only since the website hasn’t incorporated this feature as of now. It will help treat addiction of consuming just too many YouTube videos which is something Google is looking forward to curbing with its digital wellbeing feature on Android 9.0 Pie and similarly, Facebook has introduced a similar feature too.
