Last week, Google pushed out "Ambient Mode," which basically turns your phone's lock screen into a smart display. This week, Google has started rolling out a new feature called "Focus Mode" to select devices that prevents users from getting distracted.
What is Focus Mode?
One big problem that is associated with owning a smartphone is that every distraction is no more than a finger tap away - whether it's checking what your friends are up to on Instagram, scrolling through your news feed on Facebook or watching videos on YouTube. It becomes hard to focus on work, study, or even perform other tasks with so many temptations around.
Focus Mode, which Google first announced at its annual developer conference in May as part of its Digital Wellbeing feature, is a tool that provides a solution to this problem. The feature essentially stops you from opening apps that could end up distracting you and lets you place those apps on silent when you need to focus on other things, helping you stay on track
All you need to do is select the apps that you think were responsible for the last time you missed a deadline and put them on lockdown. The Mode will then put those apps on pause and even silence their notifications until you're ready to disable the feature. If you try to use any of the selected apps, the mode will remind you that the app is currently on pause.
New Features and Rollout
Google has also tossed in some cool new tweaks to improve the mode's effectiveness. These include the ability to program Focus Mode so that it automatically turns on or off based on your work schedule, say, from 9am to 5pm from Monday through Friday. It also includes a "take a break" option, which, as the name suggests, lets you step out from the mode and use the apps that you had on lockdown for five, 15 or 30 minutes.
Focus Mode made its debut as a beta when Android 10 launched earlier this year, so no additional downloads are necessary to try it out. Additionally, Focus mode is now out of beta and available for people with phones running Android 9 Pie, Google said in a blog post on Wednesday.
