Technology, apps and attention

The honest answer is that most apps are designed to take attention rather than to save it, and we tend to judge them by whether they're useful rather than by what they cost us. A tool that saves you ten minutes but takes forty is not a saving. I do think the situation is improving slightly — phones now report your screen time, and a lot of younger users I know are more sceptical than people were five years ago. But I'd be careful about blaming individuals for lacking willpower when the products are built by very large teams specifically to override it. If governments were going to regulate anything, I'd start with design features aimed at children rather than with content, because that's where the imbalance between the two sides is widest.