Astanite: Mindful Homescreen, No Distractions

Smartphones are an Indispensable part of our life. However, wherever we go we see people scrolling on thier smartphone screens mindlessly. We believe that Smartphones should not be more important than friends sitting in front of you.

Smartphone is a device intended to be controlled by us and not intended to control us. However, is really the truth? We live in an era where global tech gianst (Eg. Facebook, Google) are sustaining on an advertisment driven revenue model. This directly means that these companies have a direct incentive to keep you hooked to your smartphones.

What is Happening?

An average users checks his device 221 times and spends about 4.7 hours on his device every day. As shown by the infographic below, less than 20% of this is spent on tasks of utility:

Smartphone addiction is making people less productive and affecting their wellbeing. The long term effects of smartphone overuse are as following:

• Attention span: The attention span is the length of time a person is able to concentrate on a particular activity. According to a study by Microsoft, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in year 2000 (the beginning of mobile phone revolution) to 8 seconds in year 2015.
• Disturbed sleep cycles: Using smartphone just before sleeping leads to 90 minute delay in melatonin (sleep hormone) secretion and only half the amount is released. As a result, the amount of time spent in deep sleep (REM sleep) is decreased. Researchers recommend 2-3 hours before sleeping to be smartphone free. However, 81% users of smartphone users use their smartphone before sleeping. (Source: Harvard Medical School)
• Mental health: Smartphone addiction has been scientifically proven to degrade mental health:
• Smartphone addicted individuals have a higher GABA to Glx ratio than normal. This leads to poor cognition and regulation of emotions.
• Addicted Individuals are more likely to be depressed and feel anxious.
• Creativity: With the rise of AI, creativity is expected to be one of the most desired skills in the 21st century. We love to imagine how newton sat under a tree or einstein looked out of the window. But people don't daydream anymore. People are spending their every spare second looking at their mobile screen, missing out their moments of having the best ideas.
• Memory: Memory storage takes place in two steps:
• Brain takes new impressions and store them in a temporal manner.
• The information is moved to the long term memory when our brain is at rest.
• Smartphone addiction is also believed to degrade the quality of work and relationships.

Smartphones are only going to get more addictive and individuals are going to get more addicted. Hence, there is an urgent need to redesign our relationship with our smartphones. 

The solution: 

Apparently, modern problems require modern solutions.

The App:
Astanite homescreen installs on an Android phone like a normal app from Android Play Store. An initial method prompts you to flag all your distractive apps and asks to make it your default homescreen. Viola! you are done setting up the app and you can forget about it. Not really, though! It looks and feels like the default google launcher that ships with most phones but there’s a tweak which will save you loads of time and mental space.

Everytime you need to open an app you flagged you’d have to type the complete name in the search bar once inside in the app drawer. The app won’t show up unless you type till the last letter of the app name. Also you can’t cheat around and drag the app from the app drawer onto your main homescreen.

Clumsy typer? Don’t worry you’ll still be able to open your distracting app. We use the Soundex algorithm so that you can search your app even though there is a minor difference in spelling e.g. 'Whatsapp' can be searched with a spelling variation like 'Watsapp'.

Ultimately, it takes a little guidance to change our habits. The apps sends you motivating notifications a few times over the day to keep you constant towards your goal.

The Design Principle:
Let’s go back to the notion that makes technology so cognitively capturing. App icons are made with dazzling red and white colours that makes them strikingly noticeable nudging you to click on it. Astanite completely blocks the icon out of your first look in the app drawer preventing you to gullibly stumble upon it. This way you put a little forethought before opening the distractive app only coming out of your provision to use the app. "Typing takes just the enough effort to make us question if we really need to be using an app". 

Future Opportunities:

In the long run, a product developer must understand that it is very important for a user to relate and connect with the product. As the current product is designed to keep the app simple and user-friendly. But, as the user gets more and more acquainted with the app, several features can be built in like:

User Stats Manager: It would give an analysis of user’s phone usage over the time. It would help user to analyse the time he/she is being able to save and feel the importance of the app

Feedback Notification System: These would help user to stay motivated, focussed and effectively utilise the day. It would give a sense of positive vibe to the user, be it from an early morning bell to a midnight quote

Intelligent Motion Handler: This would predict whether the user is travelling from work to home or woke up from sleep, by collecting user’s phone usage and sensor data and suggest apps like Spotify if he/she is travelling or play a song, play a pleasant early morning music and suggest user to look at today’s google calendar if the user is just woke up. This feature can be built considering a revenue model around it. 

More about us:

Do not forget to see this video to know more about us:

The app is available on the Play Store. Try it out yourself: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.astanite.debug