There's an app for everything.
Books, news, finance and more.
"A lot of music apps as well," said 23 year old Emily Glaze.
24 year old Brad Mulvey says he has, "probably about 100" apps downloaded on his iPhone.
Statistics show the average smartphone user downloads 25 apps.
So Fox 32 News asked, are we under an app attack?
"You just caught me coming down on an escalator on my phone texting so I would say yeah, a little bit," said Glaze.
Advocate Christ Medical Center's Dr. Sachin Kapur is a trailblazer on compulsive behavior. He says app addiction is similar to drug addiction.
"You get an increase in a chemical called dopamine in the musaline pathway of the brain and it just provides a euphoric state… You are kind of withdrawing from your family. You find you're spending more time doing that than your usual activity, you find you're missing days at work, you find you're actually missing sleep," said Kapur.
Filmmakers went inside a camp in China designed to cure teens addicted to the Internet.
Here, there's prescription drugs from a neurologist, psychologist, support groups and good ol' fashion parenting.
"What I do to my daughter is I tell her there are certain days of the week where you can't have that technology," said Kapur.
Fox 32's Tisha Lewis asked new 1871 CEO Howard Tullman if society has become an app dependent society.
"I wouldn't say that, I would say that there's a tremendous number of apps and one of the things that you have to understand is that the adoption curve of apps is almost like this, it's very rapid but two days later the abandonment curve is ten times more so, so there's a tremendous amount of churn," said Tullman.
1871 is shared workspace for digital startups where 500 people create many of the world's newest smartphone applications.
"Technology is neutral, it just can be applied in good ways, bad ways, ways that are productive, ways that are huge waste of time," said Tullman.
Read more: http://www.myfoxchicago.com/story/24543280/fox-32-looks-at-dependence-addiction-to-smartphone-applications#ixzz2rPRebQsC
