Developers Should Help With The Digital Diet

In the last few years I’ve developed apps for the iPhone. As a developer, you want your app to succeed, you want users to download it, use it daily, then make it viral. It’s super easy to connect your app to Facebook these days, and by that you can increase engagement of the users – you. You can also add push notifications, which means you are allowed to nag your user, whenever you want to, not thinking about where he is now, or what he’s doing.

Developers should take responsibility

Developers should take responsibility

I remember me and the other guys in our startup sitting around the table, thinking how to make people use our app more and more. But at the same time, our team was super fair and we didn’t want to spam users, just like we don’t like it when apps are spamming us. This kind of behaviour means being responsible. Not just thinking about number of daily downloads, and how many times a day the user plays with our app; we were thinking about ourselves when we thought of “users”.

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The Fear Of Missing Out – FOMO

You know that feeling, when you are working, studying, or stuck at your parents house, and you feel that you are missing out? That party you can’t go to, that friends gathering you passed because you wanted to watch TV, that friend of yours which is in the beach right now having fun…

Since I remember myself as a kid, I had the Fear Of Missing Out. I remember a specific Friday night when my parents insisted on taking me with them to their friends, and I missed that friends party. I was only ten, but I remember that day as if it was yesterday. I cried, and had a strong belief that after this missing out I will have no friends anymore… I thought about how much fun they have without me… how the girl I loved is in this very moment falling in love with another kid from my class. He got blue eyes, mine are just boring brown…

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Organic Apps vs. Junk Apps #1

So what defines Organic Apps?

Let’s start by understanding what are non-organic apps, or should we call them Junk Apps?

Connectivity addiction happens when we consume junk apps that boost our ego, make us slaves to our smartphones, and use our data to sell to advertisers, and harm our privacy in other ways.

Here are few examples for what Junk Apps do:

  • Push Notifications make us deal with unimportant stuff when we are busy with something important.
  • Students have hard time to learn to their exams since they visit addictive apps time and again.
  • At the office, people are having a hard time concentrating on their tasks.
  • Multiple people contact us via multiple apps – messenger, whatsapp, facebook, etc – sometimes all at the same time. Which mean we do not give them the right respect and response they deserve.

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