In response to growing concerns of smartphone addiction, many big companies have introduced many usage-tracing features. Last year in Google I/O, Google introduced Digital Wellbeing feature that comes in action on Android Pie. It promised to track users phone usage time and offer many ways to reduce screen time.
But over last few days, some threads in Reddit are claiming that this Digital Wellbeing app is actually slowing down the Google Pixel devices. And switching off Digital Wellbeing in Pixel devices, they are seeing a lot of performance gain. Disabling the feature is said to smooth out framerate issues such as stuttering in certain situations, as well as improve the speed and fluidity of everyday actions like switching between apps.
Keep in mind that Digital Wellbeing data is very valuable to make better choices according to your usage habit. It helps you find the sectors where you are wasting your valuable time. It is designed to run in the background and it is not supposed to make your device slow. This issue first raised by user Trueray17 who claimed that he successfully resolved the issue.
For now, if you want to test this theory by yourself, you can do that by disabling Digital Wellbeing temporarily. To do so just follow the following process.
- Go to Settings
- Select Digital Wellbeing
- Tap on the three-dot icon at the top right and select Turn off usage access
- Select Turn off in Settings in the pop-up card
- Tap on Digital Wellbeing in the next screen
- Toggle to Permit Usage Access and turn it off.
