Instead of helping you disconnect, Digital Wellbeing could soon expand into games

Android’s Digital Wellbeing tools have been around for coming up on a decade by now, helping protect us from some of our own worst habits. Recently, it’s looked like Google’s working on a big overhaul for the app, and while that may mean removing some old features like walk detection, we could also get some new ones in the process — including a curious mini-game addition that has us scratching our heads a little bit.

Normally, we think of Digital Wellbeing as something designed to save us from excessive Android gaming — a watchdog meant to enforce limits on our screen time and make sure we’re getting the daily rest we need.

Looking through some of the changes present in version 1.48.975819457.beta of Digital Wellbeing, we’ve spotted developers building out some sort of flag trivia game:

For each round, the app presents you with a flag and four possibilities for the nation it represents. Those three hearts you see in the upper-left represent your “lives” — get a guess wrong, and you lose a heart. As you get more and more correct, you’ll see your top score in the upper-right grow accordingly, represented by that trophy.

Alright… cool! But also: What the heck is this?

So far, Digital Wellbeing hasn’t offered anything remotely like what we’re seeing here — we’re not aware of any other minigames hiding within. We suppose that maybe this could function as a little cool-down exercise, helping distract you from all your other concerns. But it’s also not exactly a prompt to help you meditate, and for a certain type of user, between the limited lives and the high-score system here, even this little trivia game might prove stressful on its own.

None of the code strings connected to it offer much insight into Google intentions, either. For the moment, at least, we might have to just wait for further progress before we get any inkling about how this would fit into the larger Digital Wellbeing picture.

Screen time reminder shake-up

In addition to that lovely geo-quiz, we’re also seeing Google work on a little tweak to how you configure screen time reminders.

The screen on the left above depicts our current interface. By default, it’s turned on for all apps, and you can deselect individual ones for exclusion by tapping their check box. But Google seems to be preparing an alternate approach here that only shows apps, and uses a trash button to remove them. If you hit the overflow menu in the top-right, you can also remove all of them at once.

If you do go ahead and wipe the slate clean, you’d have to hit that “Add apps” button to start repopulating the list. This would then bring up a list similar to the old one, where you can hit those check boxes for the apps you’d like to keep reminders on for, after all. And then you can always tap at the bottom to add more apps later.

Right now, neither of these changes is yet live in Digital Wellbeing. We’ll keep an eye out for any further progress.