Google has ignored Android’s Digital Wellbeing tools for years, so what’s next?

Take a peek in Android’s settings menu, and no matter what smartphone you have, you’ll probably find Google’s Digital Wellbeing suite hanging around. At first glance, Digital Wellbeing is perfectly modern, sporting an updated Material 3-friendly design and a whole slate of features like app timers, Bedtime mode, and more. It even has its own space within the settings menu on Pixel, rather than being buried within sub-menus like other useful tools.

But at its core, Digital Wellbeing is a product designed for the decade in which it emerged. The causes of smartphone addiction our society faces in 2026 are not equivalent to what emerged throughout the 2010s, despite plenty of familiar players begging for your attention at all times. And at this point, it’s clear no one — not Samsung, not Apple, and most certainly not Google — is coming to offer a helping hand to those who feel overwhelmed.

Google announced Digital Wellbeing at I/O 2018 before…