The YouTube app for Android and iOS is updated with a new feature that reminds users when it's time to go to bed
With more and more content on YouTube, and more and more notifications alerting us when it's posted, Google's video platform risks causing addiction. How many times, the night before going to bed, have we opened the app with the intention of watching a single video and then found ourselves, dozens of minutes later, still with the smartphone in hand watching something else entirely?
In an effort to improve the "digital well-being" of its users, YouTube will soon warn us when it's time to stop watching videos and, above all, when it's time to go to sleep. YouTube has in fact announced a new feature, called "bedtime reminders", i.e. notifications that remind us when it's time to stop using the app and go to bed. They are not yet available on Italian apps, but it shouldn't be long before we see them in Italy as well. Already in 2018 YouTube had introduced a similar but more "generic" feature, called in Italian "Remind me to take a break". According to Google through this feature have been sent, from 2018 to date, as many as 3 billion notifications to users to invite them to close the app and do something else.
Bedtime reminders: how they work
The previous notifications, which still remain available, told us to take a break every tot minutes of viewing (settable by the user). Pre-bedtime reminders, on the other hand, work differently: we have to set a fixed time at which we'll be sent a notification, choosing whether the app should wait until the end of video viewing before showing it to us. Of course we'll be able to postpone or ignore the notification, like a normal reminder.
Pre-bedtime reminders: how to set them
To set a reminder that it's time to go to sleep we'll have to open the YouTube app, tap on our profile in the upper right corner and choose "View duration". Here we already find the toggle to set generic notifications for taking a break and always here we'll also find those for going to bed. We will then be able to use this screen to set the time and options related to this new digital wellness feature. The roll out of this feature is already underway for English language apps and will soon affect Italian language apps as well.