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Apple’s New Strategy Erodes ‘Screen Time’
With a new focus on services, Apple abandons the pretense that you should look away
Last September, Apple proudly rolled out a Screen Time feature that was designed to help people manage how much they use their devices, and even get away from them altogether with a related Downtime setting.
This was a canny marketing move from the maker of the most attractive and addictive screen ever invented. And it came against the backdrop of Apple’s unusually public campaign against Facebook in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Screen Time’s promotional materials prominently featured both Facebook and Instagram, as if suggesting these two apps in particular might be a waste of your time. Never mind that Facebook’s very real privacy liabilities aren’t connected to how often you use the product. Apple had an opportunity to position itself on the higher ground of the branding battlefield, and it took it.
Whatever its intentions, Screen Time served as a way for Apple to separate its business from Facebook’s on the eve of a new platform war. The two companies are increasingly seen as rivals jockeying to…
