A new survey is revealing some surprising truths about how our favorite apps make us feel.
Time Well Spent polled 200,000 iPhone users about their app usage, and looked at whether they made them feel happy or unhappy. Unsurprisingly, meditation/mindfulness apps like Headspace ranked favorably, with 99% percent of users reporting they logged off feeling good. Music and podcast apps also received high scores.
Topping the “unhappy” list, though, was Grindr: 77% of Grindr users reporting feeling regret after surfing the ubiquitous hookup app. That’s significantly worse than the next two “unhappy” apps, Candy Crush Saga (71%) and Facebook (64%) respectively.
According to Time Well Spent, which is dedicated to “reversing the digital attention crisis,” how much time we’re on Grindr might be why it’s making us miserable.
Though Time Well Spent didn’t indicate if this trend was true for Grindr, too, most users reported logging on the app for at least an hour a day. Cutting usage by 2.4 times, to about 25 minutes a day, could make for a happier experience. (Other surveys actually report the average Grindr user spends two hours a day on the app.)
Of course, time spent is only part of the equation: Unlike a computer simulation like Candy Crush, hookup apps see us interacting with other humans at our most unguarded. I’d hypothesize a lot of that unhappiness on Grindr stems from rudeness, racism, femme-shaming, flaking, and other asshole behavior. Read more via New Now Next