How to block apps
on iPhone.

The two minute version, using Screen Time

Open Settings, then Screen Time. If you have never used it, turn it on. You now have three tools, and they do different jobs.

App Limits shuts an app once you have spent a set amount of time in it today. Tap Add Limit, pick a category such as Social, or tap a category and choose single apps inside it, then set the time. A limit of one minute is the closest thing Screen Time has to an outright block, because the app is shut almost as soon as you open it.

Downtime shuts everything except the apps you allow, on a schedule. This is the better tool for a morning or a bedtime, because it is about the hour rather than the minutes.

Content and Privacy Restrictions can hide an app entirely, and can stop apps being installed or deleted. Together with a Screen Time passcode it is the strictest setting iOS has.

Then the step almost everyone skips: Lock Screen Time Settings. Set a four digit passcode that is not your unlock code. Without it, every limit above is one tap from being switched off.

Where it stops holding

When a limit runs out, iOS shows a screen with a way past it. Depending on your settings that is one more minute, or the rest of the day. If you did not set a passcode, taking it costs you nothing but the tap. If you did set one, you can still open Settings and type the passcode you chose.

This is not a bug in Screen Time. It was built for a parent holding a passcode their child does not know. Used on your own phone, you are both the parent and the child, and the person deciding whether the limit survives the moment is the same person who wanted past it. That is the whole problem, and we wrote it up in why app blockers fail.

What a blocking app adds

Since iOS 15, Apple lets other apps use the same machinery through a permission called Family Controls. When you grant it, the app can shut the apps you pick, and Apple hands it opaque tokens rather than names. The app doing the blocking cannot read which apps you chose, when you open them, or anything inside them.

What one of these apps can add is friction the settings pane does not have: a delay before the app opens, a schedule that is harder to edit in the moment, a session you cannot end without doing something first. The mechanisms differ a lot, and so do the prices. We put six of them side by side in screen time apps compared, with a source and a date on every fact.

What ScrollBuddy does instead

Screen Time is a budget. You get minutes, you spend them, and when they run out you argue with a screen. ScrollBuddy is not a budget. The apps you picked are shut from midnight, before you have decided anything, and they stay shut until you finish one of the one to three tasks you wrote for the day. A finished task mints a thirty minute pass. Spending it opens the apps, and then they shut again.

So the phone is not asking you to have willpower at the moment you have the least of it. It is asking you, at a calm moment, what the day is for, and it holds you to your own answer. Your first full day is free. After that it costs money, and if it does not help you can walk away free.

One honest thing, because it matters more than any feature. You can turn it off. ScrollBuddy holds no key you cannot take back, and it only ever knows what you tell it. If what you need is a lock nobody can open, no app on the App Store is that, including this one.

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