There are around 2.2 million apps available for our mobile devices; even though most of these have the potential to help us become more productive, we use most of these to waste our time. In between playing games, social media, and watching television, we can bid farewell to most of our time, which is lost to these apps. These, while very entertaining, are nothing more than distractions from our daily lives.

The main distracting apps for phones is social media; mainly, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. This apps are what basically consume our life on a daily basis. The New York Times newspaper created a survey for students 13 and older asking whether apps were useful and how much time do they use them in a day. This were some of the answers “Overall, I find apps to be helpful, but they can also be distracting. For example, I have a translator app on my iPod, which is helpful with my homework. However, I tend to play one of the many game apps I have before finishing my homework. I have about 25 apps on my iPod, most of which are games, and I have 10 apps that I use on a regular basis,”, and  “I think that social media apps are the biggest waste of time that there is.” This shows how many teenage students agree on this, social media and this type of apps distract them way too much. We are constantly checking what’s new on our feed or what someone send us through this media.

Also, people spend an insane amount of time on their phone doing useless stuff on their apps. According to magazine The Independent, “this age group (teenagers) still spends significantly more time looking at smartphone screens than any other, with the average use time across all generations being 3.4 hours per day day,”. This is a huge portion of our day that could be much better spent by doing other things such as studying, working, exercising or even resting.

This happens because we prefer entertaining ourselves with our small devices instead of enjoying what life offers us outside of them. If there weren’t as many things to do on our phone we wouldn’t spend so much time on it. This includes social media, games, and other type of entertainment that don’t teach us anything. Although some people might argue that apps are a huge benefit, it’s greater the distraction they cause and the time they waste. There are really helpful apps that actually do help us, but the problem is that the use of this apps is really minor compared to the use of the apps that don’t really help us.

Apps have a huge potential of helping us being more productive and solve problems faster, we just need to know how to use them appropriately. We should stop using them for distractions and start taking advantage of what the digital world is offering us.