Stop compulsively using your phone at all times: solve cell phone addiction with a “sleepy” cell phone that takes a little bit of time to wake up!

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The Issue:

It’s common for people to compulsively and unthinkingly pull out their cell phone and fiddle with it at all times. If only there were some way to subtly discourage “snacking” on the Internet!

Proposal:

The solution is simple: every time you unlock your cell phone, it should display a yawning “groggy” face for a certain amount of time, while it grudgingly wakes up (Figure 1).

Fig. 1: With today’s lame normal phones, you can go immediately from the lock screen (left) to the cell phone content (right). But with this new “sleepy” cell phone, users must patiently wait for some amount of time (say, 15 seconds, as an initial option, as shown in the middle) before they can actually use the phone.

The amount of delay could be auto-adjusting, so if you keep waking up the cell phone (thus, metaphorically interrupting its sleep), it gets more and more tired, so the wake-up delay is longer.

Additionally, the face-detection camera could be operational during this time: users might have to stare at the sleepy phone while it wakes up. If the user fails to do so (say, they push the “wake up” button and then put the phone on a desk and walk away for a moment), then the phone will take advantage of the opportunity to go back to sleep.

Conclusion:

This should legitimately be a feature! Third party Android phone developers: get to it!!!

PROS: Teaches people to be more patient and to have more awareness of the world around them.

CONS: None!

Originally published 2025-08-18.