Adam Kos Screen Time is useful not only for keeping an eye on the kids in terms of how much time they can spend in front of glowing smartphone and tablet screens, but also for you if you want to do a digital detox or just don't want to spend all your time staring blankly at social media etc. Problem is when it doesn't work as it should.
In the Screen Time tab, you will find a lot of information, the most important of which is, of course, information about what you spend the most time on your iPhone, according to the given categories. Here you will also find a breakdown of usage by time of day, a breakdown of the titles you have used longer than you set yourself, and an overview of the notifications that steal your most attention. If you want to shorten the use of a title, you can specify a time period here, after which the launch will be prohibited. It would all be nice if it didn't only work in an ideal world.
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On Mondays, I regularly get an overview of how much or how little I work with my iPhone. It's been a month since I've had the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and before that with the iPhone 13 Pro Max I was averaging around 2 hours and 45 minutes a day. But now? Even though I use the device on my hair in the same way, the values are completely different. From the very beginning of use, they are around 6 hours, which is twice as much compared to the previous data. But why?
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Vratislav Holub Is iOS 17 to blame?
It is not necessarily Apple's fault, although it is of course the easiest to blame. The point is that apps in iOS 17 are for some reason too much active in the background, and even that is included in the total time, which of course it shouldn't be. I really don't spend more than 6 hours playing one game. In addition, Google Chrome shows a nonsensical hour and 43 minutes without even starting it today. So what's behind it all?
Star Wars: Galaxy Of Heroes
As (so far) the only reasonable explanation is a simple failure to debug the titles to the operating system. In the case of Heroes, the question is what kind of data is loaded in the background, but the RSS reader Feedly or the offline reader Pocket are connected to Chrome. You can't blame them entirely for that either. There are also websites that are also not very user friendly and if you visit them through these platforms without terminating them, they keep loading over and over again. This is typically done by unnamed music and movie websites. Specifically with them, I simply solved it by setting half an hour of activity a day. Not that I have to, but to at least slightly correct that screen time.
What will Screen Time reveal?
On the screens present, you can also notice an interesting exclamation point for the Chrome application, i.e. Google's web browser, which I use instead of Safari. When you click on the information here, you see: "This app is not trusted and may be impersonating Chrome." I have several questions about this: “How can it be untrusted when it's in the App Store — the approval process doesn't work here? How can it be untrustworthy when Google LLC is listed as the developer?”
Last but not least: "What the hell is com.apple.finder that I was supposed to be working with for 14 minutes?" The only reasonable answer seems to be that it's some Apple protocols related to AirDrop when I was sending photos from my iPhone to my Mac, but otherwise I can't really think of anything. What about you, do you also have similar "ghosts" in Screen Time? Let us know in the comments.
iOS 17 is most likely not to blame. It still shows similar data to me on 11...
Everything is fine with me too. It still shows realistically. The first thing that came to my mind, isn't it possible that you have Screen Time Sharing turned on between all your devices? If you also use a Macbook or an iMac, this would explain, for example, the Finder and possibly other applications (Chrome, etc.).