YouTube Launches ‘Take a Break’ Feature To Fight Smartphone Addiction

You can never watch just one video on YouTube as the world’s most popular videos streaming platform does its job pretty well to keep you engaged and hooked. It offers a wide range of custom-made suggestions so that you stay chained to it. The company has experienced a 200 percent growth in view-time in the last couple of years in India.

The Google-owned company has finally admitted that the average view time per user is too much and can lead to chronic smartphone addiction. Now YouTube has brought in a new update which reminds users if they are spending too much time watching videos. It has launched a new ‘Take a Break’ feature to help you pace your view time and curb YouTube addiction.

Is Smartphone Addiction Such A Serious Issue?

As a part of the technological revolution, mobile phones have taken up a major part of our lives in the last one decade. With every other new innovation in the world of tech, people have found ways to be lazy and remain stuck to their cellphones. Fueled by the Internet overuse, continuous use of smartphones creates a compulsion which leads to a variety of impulse-control problems.

Google recently launched a Digital Well Being project to address the problem seriously and the first change has been made through a YouTube update. The new initiative aims to help people understand and control their digital habits and get rid of the smartphone addiction.

So let’s take a look at how the new ‘Take a Break’ feature works.

How To Turn On ‘Take a Break’ Option?

You need to first update your YouTube app to the latest version. The new feature is available on both the latest updates of Android and iOS.

Step 1: Update your YouTube App to the latest version available (Android or iOS).

Step 2: Tap on your profile option at the top right of the display.

Step 3: Now, tap on the Settings option and you will get a “Remind me to take a break” option.

Step 4: There are multiple options from “Never” to “Every 180 minutes”.

Step 5: Select an option and YouTube will remind you according to your selection.

The new ‘Take a Break’ feature is optional, and is set to “Never” by default.

Additional New Features

Apart from the ‘Take a Break’ feature, the company has launched two more new features. The YouTube notifications menu will now have more options to customise your YouTube experience. There’s a new called ‘Disable Sounds & Vibrations’ to disable all notification sounds from the YouTube app for a particular period of time.

The other option is called ‘Scheduled Digest’ which helps you to set a time to receive all your notifications. The new feature will help you to get all your YouTube notifications once in a day at one particular time.

Google Launches New Cheaper Storage Plans

The internet giant Google is launching updated storage plans which now includes an all-new, low-cost storage plan at half the price. Also, the plans can now be shared with family members for shared access to the storage.

All the Google Drive paid storage plans will now convert into Google One plans with one-tap access to all the Google’s live customer service.

Under the new Google One plans, users will now be charged $2.99 a month. The plan will offer 200GB of cloud storage. The 2TB plan which earlier cost $19.99 per month, will now be available at $9.99 a month. The 1TB plan which cost $9.99 a month, how has been removed.

In India, the Google Drive paid plans (Google One) start at Rs 130 per month for 100GB. The 1TB plan which used to cost Rs 650 per month, which now will offer 2TB storage at the same price.

The updated plans have now been rolled out in the US and will make it to India in a couple of months.