‘It’s an illness’: China sees boom in businesses offering to end smartphone addiction
- Chinese smartphone users are banding together in online groups to share their experiences battling phone addiction
- Businesses offering to help people overcome the addiction are thriving
On Douban, a Chinese social networking website, there is a group named “Away from the screen,” which was formed in 2020 and now has over 30,000 members who are striving to break their phone addiction.
A person, with the username “Bot9,” shared a screenshot on March 8, indicating that he had spent roughly 11 hours a day on his mobile phone in the previous week.
“It’s already an illness,” he wrote. “I’m going to try to cut back on my mobile phone usage starting tomorrow.”
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However, on March 9 and 10, within two days after his original post, he revealed that his phone usage time had increased to about 12 hours per day.
As more people have become concerned about spending too much time on mobile phones and are struggling to break the habit — businesses offering to help users overcome phone addiction are thriving.
“The market has great prospects for growth because numerous apps make it difficult for people to put down their phones once they pick them up,” said Liu Yang, 36, owner of Shiguang Box, which sells “phone isolation boxes” that it says help people reduce screen time.
It requires four simple steps to separate the phone from its owner; open the box, place the phone inside, close it, and set a lock timer. The phone can only be accessed once the timer ends.