Google's Pixel Phones are slowed down by their Digital Wellbeing feature

Application developers and large technology companies have responded to growing concerns about smartphone addiction by offering a range of usage tracking services to address a user's bad habits.

The Google Digital Wellness service is one of those applications, which promises to track and measure seamlessly the use of your phone while simultaneously offering ways to reduce the time of your work. screen in some applications.

However, as evidenced many the sons on the subreddit r / GooglePixel, it seems that the application is responsible for the poor performance of the latest flagship Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL handsets and their more affordable counterparts, Pixel 3a and Pixel 3a XL.

At the moment, the only fix seems to be to disable the application's access to some features of the Android operating system, which paralyzes its capabilities to some extent.

(Image: © TechRadar)

It is said that disabling this feature alleviates framerate issues such as stuttering in certain situations, while improving the speed and fluidity of daily actions such as switching between applications.

Tested on a new Pixel 3a provided to TechRadar for review, we did not notice any immediate changes after disabling the feature – an experience shared with some Reddit commentators – although a considerable number of responses over the wire indicate a significant increase the speed of treatment. other handsets in the Pixel range.

For those who own a Pixel handset and want to test the fix, here's how. Open the settings, search for "Access to Use" and tap the corresponding result. From there, select Digital Welfare and disable the slider labeled "Allow access to use".

Fortunately, this does not affect all the features of the Digital Wellbeing service – the Wind Down feature (which allows you to set a time for Do Not Disturb mode, Nightlight mode, and Grayscale filter that deter all some hours users) still works well, for example.