Facebook’s new tool will help you limit the time you spend on the social media site

By Abdul Wahab ⏐ 7 years ago ⏐

2 min read

Ever since Google introduced Digital Well-being, a feature that tells you how much time you’ve spent on different apps on your mobile and limits its usage according to the set-time by the user, it has received positive feedback from consumers in general since smartphone addiction has become a serious problem in today’s time.

Taking inspiration from this, Instagram has also introduced its new dashboard that shows how much time a user has spent on Instagram, and now its parent company, Facebook, has also announced that it is rolling out “Your time on Facebook” tool. This feature is being integrated into Facebook’s main app and it basically shows how many minutes the user has spent on the app for each day, the past week and the average in general. The user can basically set a time-limit to this and set a reminder once he/she has completed their daily-set time limit the app will notify them. This feature also gives shortcuts to notifications, News Feed and Friend Request settings, only the last two shortcuts are new.

Facebook initially announced the new dashboard for Instagram and Facebook back in August but it took some time to finally reach consumer’s smartphones. According to the social media giant, they needed to fix some bugs before the complete rollout took place. The question now is whether or not these tools will actually help the users limit their time on these social media platform, since, unlike Apple’s Screen Time and Google’s Digital Wellbeing, which allow users to block themselves from using this app, Instagram and Facebook only shows you a daily notification of your usage.

This new feature will roll out to users with the next update, but will only be limited to the smartphone app version of Facebook, and will not be available on the Desktop version.