Tim Cook says he monitors his Screen Time reports ‘pretty religiously’ – but doesn’t say how long he spends using his iPhone

• Tim Cook told GQ magazine that Apple created tools to let users monitor time spent on their devices.
• He believed that spending more time on your phone than interacting with people was “the wrong thing.”
• The Apple CEO told GQ that he looked “pretty religiously” at his own Screen Time reports.  

Tim Cook said he “religiously” monitored his iPhone’s Screen Time reports because he thought no one should be spending more time looking at their iPhones than interacting with people.

The Apple CEO told GQ magazine that the company has created tools for users that aimed to “help them put the phone down.” 

“My philosophy is: if you’re looking at the phone more than you’re looking in somebody’s eyes, you’re doing the wrong thing,” Cook said. “So we do things like Screen Time. I don’t know about you, but I pretty religiously look at my report.”

However, he didn’t reveal how much time a day he spent on his iPhone.

Screen Time lets users monitor how much time they spend on their phones and what apps and websites were used. It also allows parents to monitor their kids’ online activities and set time limits.

According to a 2022 report by app monitoring firm App Annie, which looked at ten markets including the US, Singapore and Canada, smartphone users were spending an average of 4.8 hours a day on their devices the previous year. 

Cook told GQ that kids are “born digital,” and it was “really important to set some hard rails” around their online activities.

“We don’t want people using our phones too much. We’re not incentivized for that; we don’t want that. We provide tools so people don’t do that,” he added.

Cook has rarely revealed much about his personal life but told GQ his day starts at 5 a.m. looking at customer emails. He’s one of the few big tech bosses to have an email address open to the public.

In a piece for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2014, Cook came out, making him the first openly gay CEO of a Fortune 500 company. He wrote: “I realize how much I’ve benefited from the sacrifice of others.”