Yes you heard right! There is a smartphone app that will discourage you to use your smartphone. The app ‘Apple Tree’, developed by a team of 20-year-old Republic Polytechnic students have won an award for the Apple Tree app, which is meant to discourage people from using smartphones.
The Strait Times reported that Libern Lin, Fang Lingqing and Lester Yap won the award at the Splash Awards on Tuesday to develop their app idea Apple Tree. The app is scheduled to be released in March 2015.
The award was organized by the Singapore Computer Society, where youngsters from schools and universities across Singapore came together to compete. The theme was to come up with an app that would bring together the local community.
How it works:
Apple Tree is a simple app that encourages people to spend more time communicating face-to-face rather than being glues to their smartphones. The app has been built intelligently, but stays pretty simple. All one needs to do is run the app and bring the phones closer to the other person or a group of people, who are also running the same app. Once the phones are close to each other, the app immobilises the phone completely and shows up an apple tree growing on the screens. The more you keep the smartphones together (untouched), you will see more apples growing on the tree, meaning that you are now speaking and communicating face to face rather than using the smartphone.
These apples can be harvested and exchanged for rewards. So the longer you are in communicating face-to-face, the more you harvest apples and thus, higher the rewards.
