Opal - Save Time Dail‪y

By intentionally disabling certain apps on their phone, kids may be able to use this tool to help them avoid distractions. The developers' goal with Opal - Save Time Dail‪y is to help users make purposeful, intentional decisions about when and for how long they want to use certain apps on their phone. They make big claims about improving productivity, quality of sleep, family or friend time, and more. Sure kids can just simply put their phone away, or turn it off -- and that would certainly do the trick. Opal - Save Time Dail‪y assumes that taking such drastic steps, and sticking to them, requires too much will power -- and for some, that assumption may be true. Opal - Save Time Dail‪y also nicely allows kids to be more selective about what they disable. Kids can keep their phone handy for phone calls, but turn off social media, for example. Most of the major time sucks are there, and can be chosen individually or as part of a category. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an option to turn off access to a web browser.

One downside is that, although apps don't load anything new when they've been disconnected, they do continue to display cached data. That means that there's still something to look at or scroll through when kids open an app. And, although the developer's promise that all data and networks are localized on your phone only, not everyone will be pleased about having a VPN running constantly in the background. Finally, the stats report is based on lots of assumptions and isn't all that useful. But overall, Opal - Save Time Dail‪y may be worth a try for kids having trouble disconnecting from their phone.