How Smartphone (and App) Designers Get You Addicted

Manipulative Brain Games

Apps also work on the principle of loss aversion. This is a term from psychology which means that if you’ve put time and effort into something you’re more likely to carry on doing it.

Most of the games you play on your phone don’t give you any kind of reward beyond a dopamine rush, and while that’s addictive in itself, it doesn’t explain why you’d play one particular game for hours and hours.

You could get the same pleasure from playing ten different games, so why are you playing Fruit Ninja for five hours straight?

Because your brain knows that you’ve put all that time into it, so it assumes that it must be important and therefore it would be a huge loss if you were to stop. You don’t want to experience loss, so you keep on playing.

Being addicted to your phone isn’t necessarily a problem. If you have other things in your life that make you feel good and you have relationships with people that don’t happen exclusively through social media, then checking your phone throughout the day isn’t a terrible thing.

But if you ever wonder why you feel compelled to look at the screen so often, remember that whole teams of developers and designers have worked hard to release little amounts of dopamine or cortisol into your brain and to use your natural instincts to keep you swiping and clicking all day.