Not relevant, since the fundamental issues still aren't being addressed. By and large, dysfunction will just find a different way to manifest itself.
Moreover, treating the symptom without treating the disease will be an inordinate struggle until the underlying issues are understood, processed and addressed. This will leave most of the afflicted no better off, and in some ways, significantly worse for the failed effort.
Mental health is costly and difficult. There is no shortcut around this. You can't replace it with an app, or we would have replaced it with a book.
Recovering mental health usually takes years. The sufferer or people who care about the sufferer have to learn enough to solve the problem. They must free themselves from false beliefs and keep trying things till they find something that works.
Addiction is an obstacle to learning and (more generally) to making progress in life because a large fraction of one's potentially-productive time gets absorbed by the addictive behavior.
Replacing an iPhone or Android phone with a phone that is even slightly less addictive (if such a phone existed) would allow a person and those who care about the person to engage in the probably-years-long process of learning and trial and error faster, resulting in fewer years lost to addiction (statistically speaking).
* * *
Seeing concrete examples of lives ruined by addiction (or by some other illness) makes a person uncomfortable. A natural human response would be for me to reduce that uncomfortable feeling by telling myself it will happen to me because, e.g., (a) the sufferer behaved immorally whereas I am moral or, e.g., (b) the sufferer did not obey the rules of society whereas I do.
Are you sure that you haven't reduced your discomfort around addiction by telling yourself that it cannot happen to you or those you love because you and those you love are willing to do the hard work of getting to the "root cause" of the addiction?
(Or maybe you believe that it can happen to you, but that you will be able to fix the root cause before a large fraction of your life is ruined by the addiction.)
I ask because your comment skates close to what we might call "essentialism", in which you argue that it is useless for you and I try to help the addict because what is wrong is something essential to the addict, so of course only the addict himself can help.
I wonder whether this next would be considered by you as merely treating the symptom of addiction:
Joe notices that most of the time he spend on the web is wasted time. So he cancels his home internet connection and relies on his connection at work to get done everything that needs to get done on the web. For example, at work he downloads movies and TV shows from the iTunes Movie Store (or whatever they're calling it now) onto his MacBook for watching at home. (or he uses youtube-dl to download Youtube and Daily Motion videos.)
Is that in your opinion uselessly treating a symptom of addiction?
If it was that easy for Joe, he wasn't addicted, and it was his integrated recognition of the problem, and not the ritual he imposed as a result, that substantiated the change.
If he was, he found something else to replace it, and is no better off.
Moreover, treating the symptom without treating the disease will be an inordinate struggle until the underlying issues are understood, processed and addressed. This will leave most of the afflicted no better off, and in some ways, significantly worse for the failed effort.
Mental health is costly and difficult. There is no shortcut around this. You can't replace it with an app, or we would have replaced it with a book.