From Digital Self-Control Apps to iOS Shortcuts: Enabling Privacy-Centric Wellbeing Research Without Code

Academic research on Digital Self-Control Tools (DSCTs), i.e., mobile applications that enable users to exercise control over technology use, faces technical and privacy-related challenges. This paper lays the foundations for an alternative approach: empowering researchers to use automation tools, e.g., iOS Shortcuts, to create and evaluate interventions without writing code. First, we interrogate the capabilities of iOS Shortcuts in replicating current DSCT functionalities, grounding our exploration in a state-of-the-art taxonomy of intervention strategies. Findings show that iOS Shortcuts is a viable tool for digital-wellbeing research as it can replicate 75% of the features of contemporary DSCTs, potentially overcoming DSCTs' well-known limits, e.g., through multi-device and feature-level interventions. Then, we report on a between-subject study (N=193) investigating how researchers should distribute interventions to participants in digital wellbeing experiments. Results highlight that iOS Shortcuts can alleviate initial privacy concerns among participants by empowering them to manually re-create the intervention to be tested.