I love to mindlessly scroll social media. Then I tried an app that made me take steps to get screen time.
In a digital world where people track everything from calories to workouts and even minutes spent asleep, there are very few metrics that I myself actually pay attention to. I wear an Apple Watch to see how many steps I'm getting, though I seldom check the results. And when my iPhone tells me how much time I'm spending online, I usually swipe away the alert and continue happily watching makeup reels or seeing what Joe Jonas is up to on Instagram. But then Steppin encouraged me to pay attention.
The app, which launched this January, is something that I stumbled upon during research for another story — one about young people trading in modern technologies for more analog versions to limit screen time. Opting for a 'dumb' flip phone felt a bit drastic for me, but the concept around Steppin was something I felt I could get behind. In order to scroll, you need to stroll.
Every 100 steps (tracked on your iPhone or preferred fitness tracker) grants users a minute of screen time on the apps they've chosen to limit. If you find that you just really, really need to see what your old coworkers are up to on LinkedIn, post a TikTok or check how many likes your latest Instagram post got — well, you'd better get moving.
I'm an active person who starts most days with a workout, which made me confident that having enough steps to access limited apps wouldn't be a problem. But would it actually make me more mindful of my screen time? Here's what I found out.
Steppin is the brainchild of Paul English, CEO of Boston Venture Studio and the co-founder of travel website Kayak. He tells me the idea of the iOS app was sparked while he was on a vacation in Madrid with his fiancée and his son. During a long drive, the group realized they were all staring at their phone screens instead of admiring the views.
'We weren't talking, we were all just on Instagram or TikTok,' English says. 'I made a remark like, 'Guys, this is crazy. We're on vacation in this beautiful country. What are we doing on our phones?''
It's a question many people have no doubt asked themselves after whiling away a beautiful day/dinner with friends/movie night on their phones. But instead of demanding that everyone put their devices away, English's family created a gamified solution — one with a built-in motivation to up your step count. If you can't stay offline, you're at the very least getting some exercise, and having a higher step count comes with a host of health benefits.
'Someone came up with the idea by saying, 'Since we didn't walk today, we shouldn't get to use our social media. Why don't we make it so you have to walk to get access?' And I said, 'That's a genius idea, let's do it,'' English recalls.
Steppin — which allows users to customize how many steps they need to hit to get a minute of screen time — is part of a new breed of apps designed to cut back on smartphone usage. At first, Jess Rauchberg, assistant professor of communication technologies at Seton Hall University, explains to me, these types of features were aimed at parents who wanted to control what their kids accessed online and for how long. Now, it's people of all ages who are looking to cut back. (A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll of 1,560 U.S. adults found that among the 96% of respondents who own a smartphone, 46% said they spent 'too much' time on the devices.)
'As technologies become more effectively designed to get us to use them more and more, companies are profiting off of our constant scrolling and it's created a new layer of moral panic,' Rauchberg says, pointing to concerns about the addictive nature and mental health impacts of social media. Apple's Screen Time feature tracks how many hours a day a user spends on their phone, while apps like Freedom, OffScreen and ScreenZen curb the use of time-sucking apps and websites by using time blocks and reminders to be mindful of scrolling.
But English says Steppin is unique in incorporating physical activity (for the record, Fitlock, which claims to be 'the world's first fitness-based app blocker,' was released on iOS in November 2023). He believes it to be the answer for people increasingly worried about being addicted to social media and their smartphones.
'We've started to see a moral value assigned to technology, that if you're so reliant on these tools, it's bad and it's not healthy,' says Rauchberg. Movement, on the other hand, is healthy, so the idea is to replace a poor habit with a good one.
'Rather than just having a time restriction on certain apps, ours makes you do something healthy,' English adds. 'You have to get up, get outside and take a walk around the block to earn screen time. We think of it as a wellness app that helps with both mental and physical health.'
I downloaded Steppin to find out and got a prompt to choose my 'most distracting apps' that would be restricted. Mine were TikTok, Instagram and Facebook initially, followed by a quick amendment to add Snapchat. Then I was able to set the rules for my restriction, including how many steps would earn me a minute of screen time and how often that available time tracker would reset.
Allowing Steppin to access my Apple Health data was the next step, since the app would rely on my step count to function. Immediately, this felt more productive and rewarding than the simple time limits that my boyfriend places on his social media apps. With those, nothing is earned; you're simply locked out from checking Instagram, etc., during a set time block.
The pang of anxiety I felt when my favorite social media apps went gray — meaning I couldn't click on them — suggested I needed some type of intervention. But I was surprised to find that the days that followed have gone pretty smoothly.
My earned time resets at midnight, which means I wake up to 0 minutes earned and can't start my day scrolling. It gives me more time to focus on what's ahead and approach my day more mindfully. It also spares me from the quick dopamine hits that otherwise keep me reaching for my phone throughout the rest of the day. I quickly grew comfortable with the idea that checking Instagram or TikTok is something I can reserve for a quieter moment toward the end of the day (after I've gotten my steps in and earned enough credit, of course).
Where I'm not sure it translates is the incentive to move more. Again, I'm generally active, and I enjoy going on walks, especially when it's springtime in New York City. Over one week, I averaged 6,934 steps a day, which means I earned over an hour to spend on certain apps, and I was able to accomplish that without putting too much thought into it. It helps that I wear an Apple Watch, which is tracking the steps I take around my apartment or at the office, which add up. But even on a lazier day, I don't think I'd be hitting the treadmill in order to get time to scroll, especially when I can find other ways to spend my time.
On Tuesday evening after work, for example, I pulled out a paint-by-numbers project that I hadn't worked on in months. On Wednesday, I came home from the office to make dinner and banana bread from scratch. Yes, these activities felt better (and are better) for me than scrolling Instagram or TikTok. However, they weren't movement-based.
My consumption of social media has definitely been impacted by the use of this app. The day before I downloaded Steppin, I was on Instagram (my most-used app) for two hours and 11 minutes. Once I started using Steppin, I spent less than 30 minutes a day on the social media platform. I'll admit sneaking a few peeks at Instagram on my work laptop, which Steppin doesn't have access to, but that still only amounted to a few minutes per day.
I can't say that I'm using my smartphone less, however. The time that I would have spent on TikTok, I ended up using to stream YouTube TV to watch the latest episode of Summer House while cooking. And when I'm in the mood for a scroll, I've found myself looking through endless clothing rental options on Rent the Runway.
'There's always a replacement for an app that you just deleted or restricted,' Ari Lightman, professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, tells me. Even English says that he downloaded the Kindle app so he can read in his downtime instead of checking X or LinkedIn. Either way, he's using his phone.
'My concern here is that we still depend on the app to tell us that we're being healthier. ... So the phone is still at the center of this,' Rauchberg points out.
Come to think of it, I've probably spent a good portion of my screen time checking my usage or looking at my personal analytics on Steppin to see if I'm making positive changes, which might be a bit counterintuitive. 'We're so obsessed with data and metrics that we're not escaping the problem,' says Rauchberg. But, she concedes, 'These apps are a start and there's a lot of good that could come out of it.'
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