This App Will Make You Cringe

I get criticized all the time about how often I check my phone, but a 2013 report shows that I am far from alone in my impulse. The average person checks their phone 150 times in a day. (I'm in a long-distance relationship —what's your excuse?) Well, if you feel like having the biggest guilt complex possible for your IRL friends, download Checky, the new app that tracks how many times you check your phone.

Checky creates a location map of where you have checked your phone that day, and makes the results easily shareable on Facebook and Twitter. There's also an option to notify you about your unlock count at noon.

It isn't exactly the first of its kind, but rather than tracking the time spent on the phone or on social media like Moment, it simply counts the number of times that you unlock it. So if you were panicking about if simply pressing the home screen would count toward your daily total, it doesn't. Although, if you're already wondering about that, you may have a problem.

The app's founder Alex Tew told TechCrunch that Checky was a way to keep him, you know, in check:

Like many folks, I am pretty much addicted to my phone. And now I know exactly how much: most days I check my phone over 100 times. In fact, yesterday I checked my phone 124 times. Today I’m at 76, so far. Having this new awareness makes it easier to control my phone usage. My new goal is to check less than 100 times a day.

But the social media tie-ins offer an implied sense of accountability, too. Sharing your results with Facebook or Twitter can give your friends ammo for your cocktail-hour phone habits. "UGH no wonder she doesn't remember that Christine broke up with him for the 32nd time. She was on her phone the whoooole tiiiime."

Even having the app for an hour made me more conscious of how often I opened my phone. Unfortunately, this meant that I would just leave messaging windows open and keep intermittently tapping in order to avoid adding to my unlock count (did I miss the point or something...?).

Clicky is the second app rolled out by Tew, who is also behind the successful micro-meditation app Calm, which is advertised in a banner at the bottom of Clicky. So now you can simultaneously feel bad for opening your phone too much and relax while doing it.

Image: Calm.com, Getty Images