(Pic: The hold app is available across all major mobile app stores)

Norway students have invented a way to encourage people to keep their phones away and out of their hand constantly. Sidney Stanford reports

Several UK companies such as Vue Cinemas, Amazon and Café Nero, have teamed up with three developers from Norway who have generated a new reward scheme app which offers you vouchers and discounts for refraining from using your smartphone. In a world where smartphones are used in every day to day life and young people (especially millennials who have been brought up exclusively around these technologies), get addicted and spend all of their time texting or on social media.

All from Norway, Maths Mathisen, Florian Winder and Vinoth Vinaya all met at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark and came together to create this service, after all experienced problems with phone addiction. One of the CEOs, Mathisen, told the London Evening standard that: “With Hold app’s marketplace, we want to reward users for not using their phone, rather than punish them. We believe that for students aspiring to achieve the highest grades it is essential for them to be present and fully engaged with their surroundings, allowing for richer and more memorable experiences, without the constant distraction of a mobile phone.”

The app itself rewards you for every amount of time you leave your phone untouched between the hours of 7 am to 11 pm and is always running in the background so the results are accurate. The app has already made over £800,000 in seed funding and as time goes by more companies are hopping on board with the idea to provide incentives for not using your phone.

You can find the app on the Apple Store and Google Play.