Digital Wellbeing prepares to let you schedule Focus Mode for distracting apps

Google’s Digital Wellbeing tool launched in the middle of last year as a Pixel-exclusive, but it’s now available on smartphones from many different OEMs. Since its initial release, the digital wellness tool has added features like Google Chrome website usage tracking, Family Link integration, app pausing from the launcher, and most recently, Focus Mode to pause distracting apps. We’ve seen variations of “Focus Mode” through other apps on the Play Store or on other platforms for some time, but Google’s implementation is convenient because it’s built-in. Now, with version 1.0.268678005.beta of the Digital Wellbeing app, we’ve spotted evidence that the feature will let you schedule when to pause distracting apps.

An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.

Currently, there are two ways in which Digital Wellbeing can prevent you from opening time-wasting apps: automatically via an app timer (based on screen time usage) or manually via the Focus Mode toggle. In the near future, you’ll be able to set when you want apps to be paused while in Focus Mode. For example, you can set Focus Mode to block time-wasters during your typical working hours.

The following strings were added in the latest beta for scheduling Focus Mode.

<string name="focus_mode_schedule_set">Set</string>
<string name="focus_mode_set_schedule">Set schedule</string>

In addition, a new Activity, com.google.android.apps.wellbeing.focusmode.schedule.FocusModeScheduleActivity, and new layouts, focus_mode_add_schedule_list_item, focus_mode_schedule_fragment_contents, focus_mode_schedule_list_item, and focus_mode_schedule_list_item_contents, were added in the update. However, the Activity currently crashes when launched. We should see this feature become available soon, though, in addition to the “screen time goal” we spotted earlier. We’ll let you know when that happens.

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Thanks to PNF Software for providing us a license to use JEB Decompiler, a professional-grade reverse engineering tool for Android applications.

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