Why is DND on our phones not active by default?
You go to a shop, or you order a shiny phone online and it gets delivered. You switch it on - you are very happy with this new piece of tech. You set it up, install a bunch of apps, sign in to them. Now you are updated with the latest and greatest of what is happening in the world. You can play games, talk to your friends. Mobile tech is awesome.
But how much is your screen time? How much are you spending on the phone rather than actually being alive? How much are you living the digital life versus the real one? Has your walking time reduced? Has your in-person time reduced? Has your socialization reduced? Is it worth it?
“I can just use my DND.” But do you?
Here is the thing. If the company selling the phone wanted you to use it only when you need to, DND would be on by default. The setup flow would ask you for your silent hours - right there, while you are setting up the phone. Instead it is an extra feature that almost nobody ever finds. The data backs that up. In a survey of Apple users - already a tech-savvy crowd - 72 percent said they never used the Focus feature (TidBITS, 2022). The AAA Foundation found that 32 percent of drivers who do not use DND simply did not know the feature existed, and 60 percent of former users just forget to turn it on (AAA, 2025). A telematics study found over 60 percent of drivers were aware of DND While Driving but only 20 percent used it (Cambridge Mobile Telematics). And an IIHS survey found only one in five eligible iPhone owners had DND While Driving set to activate automatically - because the feature waits for an opt-in almost nobody makes (IIHS).
The same pattern shows up in messaging. WhatsApp has more than 2 billion users across 180-plus countries, but only about 100 million monthly users in the US, where it stays less popular than iMessage (The Verge, 2024). Pew’s 2025 survey put WhatsApp at about 32 percent of American adults, up from 23 percent in 2021 - the default everywhere else, an also-ran where SMS and iMessage simply come installed (Pew Research). People use what is already there. Nobody wants to put in the effort to install a new app.
So when your phone ships with every notification on, that is a feature, not a bug. The company has offloaded the task of being an adult onto the adult who bought the phone - but that adult is now fighting algorithms they cannot see, running in the cloud, never met and never will. It is very hard to defeat an enemy you do not even know is present. And the algorithms have a single objective: make sure you spend more time on the device. It may feel like you are getting useful information, but the end goal is not that you become a millionaire. The end goal is that you get satisfaction from using the device - which normally translates to you using the device more.
Now we have established that it is not in the company’s benefit to protect your time. It is only in the company’s benefit to make you feel that the company is taking care of you. So it will give you useful information, useful news, tools to improve whatever dimension of yourself you want - but fundamentally it has a different incentive than you do, which is to make sure you buy the next device it launches.
So protect your time. Keep DND on. Star the contacts you want to be reachable by, and let everything else go into DND - reachable by you when you want, when you have the spare time, maybe once a day, maybe even less. Protect your time, because that is all you got.