The built-in Android phone app that most users never bother to use (but should)

You probably don’t even know how much time you waste every day scrolling through social media and playing mobile games. Well, your Android phone has a tool to break your scrolling habits and it’s probably been sitting untouched in your settings since the day you unboxed your device. Digital Wellbeing, Google’s built-in usage tracking app, has been installed more than 10 billion times, but most people never open it willingly. It usually appears without an icon on the home screen, buried in the Settings menu where only the curious find it.

That’s a shame, because Digital Wellbeing does more than count the number of times you’ve unlocked your phone today. It offers true behavioral insight into app usage patterns and notification volume, and gives you tools to help you set limits around your screen time. With 1.49 million reviews and a decent 4.1 star rating, the app’s core functionality stands up well for its intended purpose.

Here’s the thing, though, not all Android phones have this exact app, some have their own alternatives. Samsung Galaxy phones, for example, don’t come with Google’s Digital Wellbeing app, but they do come with their own version. Google requires Android makers to include screen time and parental controls tools at the top level of settings, but gives them the freedom to use Google’s app or their own equivalent. Samsung is of course not the only brand that has decided to bundle its phones with its own apps, as Huawei has done the same. Generally, the apps will offer pretty much the same features, with brands offering their own extras.

So, what does digital well-being actually do and why is it an extremely useful tool to use? Let’s see why this built-in app is the sleeper tool you actually need in your life.

Digital Wellbeing is a free app developed by Google LLC, listed in the Tools category on the Google Play Store. You’ll find it pre-installed on many Android devices, usually accessed through Settings rather than the app menu. Once opened, it provides a daily graph of your phone habits, covering screen time, how often you unlock your device, how many notifications you’ve received, and which apps you’ve used the most. From there, you can drill down into details by tapping on any app to see exactly how much time you spent there today.

Beyond tracking, the feature set extends to setting app timers so you can limit daily use of specific tools. Once the timer runs out, the app icon will darken and it will close for the day, with timers resetting at midnight. You can even set timers for entire selections of apps, like social media.

Samsung goes a step further and compares the time you spent playing games to the time you spent on social media and the exact amount of time you used on productivity and finance apps. Samsung’s Digital Wellbeing version can also track how long you use your phone while driving or walking.

The Digital Wellbeing app has some very useful features that can help you manage your screen time with just a few clicks. You can enable something called Bedtime mode where your screen goes grayscale and Do Not Disturb is set to a schedule designed to encourage you to put the phone down before bed. Focus modeanother tool found in this app, pauses distracting apps with a single click, thereby blocking their notifications.

Samsung offers some additional modes, allowing you to customize how you want the app to work in other situations. For example, when Work Mode is enabled (managed via Modes and Routines), the Digital Wellbeing app will set the phone to only vibrate and activate power saving. When you customize it, you can choose to turn the mode on automatically, which can happen within a certain amount of time or when you open an app such as your company’s email tool. Since most of us launch these apps outside of work hours, you can choose a time interval and which days of the week. You can even choose to automatically trigger this mode when you are at your desk, but this will require activating GPS. It’s even possible to decide exactly what the phone does when Work mode is activated.

There are other modes and routines you can enable, like what your phone should do when you’re at the movies, when you’re driving, exercising, relaxing, or gaming, just to name a few. You can even create your own.

No matter which version of this Android Digital Wellbeing tool you have, you should try it, evaluate the time you spend on your phone and see how the app can help you.