Phone Addict for iPhone

Do you impulsively check your phone for new emails, tweets, FB posts, news articles and a myriad of other information, even when you do not want to be on your phone? We all do. We are a generation of short attention span, information craving beings always looking for quick gratification.

Hence my inspiration for Phone Addict. It is time to retrain your brain!

Phone Addict is a game that retrains you to use your phone only when you need it, rather than impulsively checking it when you don’t. The concept is simple, you are rewarded when you are not using your phone. The app consists of 11 levels of difficulty, which must be conquered to become a Phone Addict Master.

You can post your scores to Facebook from within the app to compete with your addicted peers.

Phone Addict for iPhone

When you first install the app, you must begin racking up 24 hours of idle time to unlock the first Challenge. You do this by simply starting the Free Running Timer  and then locking your phone. As long as you don’t exit Phone Addict, you will earn a point every 6 minutes (10 points per hour). While the timer is running, you can see how many points you have earned for staying off of your phone and how long you have to go until you earn another point.

See how much you’ve earned and how long you have to go

Once you earn your first 240 points (24 hours of idle time), then you unlock the first Challenge and the real training begins. When you start a Challenge you are betting that you can go the full duration of the Challenge without using your phone. If you succeed, then you get the points. If you fail, then the points are deducted from your score. Once you complete a Challenge, the next Challenge is unlocked. Each successive Challenge is worth exponentially more points.

The ten Challenges range from 30 minutes worth 50 points all the way up to 48 hours of uninterrupted idleness worth 500,000 points at which point you become a Phone Addict Master.

Your Challenge Level, Total Score, and Daily Average point value are all tracked by Phone Addict and can be posted to Facebook at anytime to show your friends where you stand.

Even in my testing of the app, I find myself not wanting to get on my phone if I am in the middle of a Challenge. Therefore, it works! 🙂

With any luck, Phone Addict will be live by the end of this week and I’ll post a link.

[UPDATE] – We’re live! See the link at the top of this post.