Frequently Asked Questions

When you turn a rule on, TimeBack registers the block with iOS right away. The shield you see on a blocked app, though, is drawn by iOS itself — and iOS can take a few seconds (occasionally longer) to refresh it, especially right after several quick changes. If the shield hasn't appeared yet, the block is still already in place. Give it a moment; toggling the rule repeatedly can actually make iOS take longer.

When a break ends, the app locks again, and TimeBack waits for you to tap Continue instead of unlocking silently in the background. Part of this is a platform rule — the screen that shows the lock isn't allowed to complete an unlock on its own. And part of it is intentional: that one small tap is a moment to decide whether you really want to go back in.

A Daily Limit is a time budget: an app stays available until you've used up the minutes you allowed for today, then it locks. A Schedule is a time window: the apps it covers are locked during the hours you set (for example 22:00–08:00), no matter how little you've used them. They work independently, and one app can be covered by both.

1) Open TimeBack once — rules re-sync with the system every time the app comes to the foreground. 2) Make sure Screen Time permission is still granted (iOS Settings → Screen Time). 3) Open the rule and confirm it is enabled and still has apps selected. 4) For Schedules, double-check the time window and the repeat days. 5) Still stuck? Email us from Settings → Support — the message comes pre-filled with your app version, so we can help faster.

No. Your usage data stays on your device. TimeBack has no accounts and no analytics. Apple's Screen Time framework is also built so that TimeBack itself only works with anonymous app references — not a readable list of what you use.

Screen Time permission (Apple's Family Controls) is the only mechanism iOS offers that lets one app limit another. Everything TimeBack does — shields, minute counting, schedules — is built on it. Without the permission nothing can be blocked, and if it is revoked later, all rules stop until it is granted again.

That is how the iOS switch works: Apple's Screen Time framework offers a single device-wide "deleting apps" restriction, not a per-app one. When you turn on Prevent App Deletion, iOS stops every app on the device from being deleted — TimeBack included, which is the point — and there is no way for TimeBack to protect only itself. The confirmation dialog says so before anything is applied, and you can turn the switch off at any time (if you have set a guardian PIN, turning it off asks for that PIN first).

TimeBack asks iOS to fire the limit at exactly the minutes you set. However, iOS keeps two separate internal counters for app usage: the one that fires limit events, and the one behind the usage figure you see on the dashboard (which matches the system Screen Time app). In our measurements the two can disagree by several minutes on the same day, with the event counter running ahead — so the lock can appear while the dashboard still shows a few minutes remaining. This happens inside iOS and affects Apple's own Screen Time limits too; TimeBack cannot read the dashboard figure at enforcement time to correct it. If a lock feels early, open TimeBack and use Unlock Once on the rule's card (or toggle the rule off) — you stay in control. The block screen itself stays firm: its OK button closes the app without lifting the lock, so a reflexive tap can't undo your limit. Everything resets at midnight.

That's an iOS limit rather than a TimeBack choice: the system refuses to monitor a blocking window under 15 minutes and rejects the schedule outright. TimeBack used to let you save one anyway — it would then sit in your list looking enabled while never blocking anything. Now the Save button stays off until the window is long enough, and tells you why. One detail worth knowing: a window that crosses midnight counts as two separate periods — the part before midnight and the part after — and each one needs its own 15 minutes. So 23:50–08:00 won't save (barely ten minutes fall before midnight), while 23:00–08:00 is fine. If what you want is a short, one-off block, use Block Now on the rule's card instead: it locks immediately and stays locked until you lift it, with no minimum length.

The usage figure on a rule's card comes from Apple's Screen Time data, and websites are included — even browsing on other devices signed in to the same Apple Account with cross-device sharing turned on (say, Safari on your Mac). The vast majority of websites show up as expected. In our testing, though, a few websites are persistently attributed by the system to a corresponding app instead, and stop producing website-level data on any device. The confirmed example is youtube.com: its browsing time is counted as YouTube app usage — even after removing the YouTube web app on the Mac and uninstalling the YouTube app on the iPhone. This happens inside Apple's data attribution layer, and TimeBack cannot read data that never appears. What matters: blocking is not affected. Time spent on such websites still counts toward the rule's limit, and the lock still lands on time — only the card's usage number can't show that share. If a website rule locks while showing a tiny number, this is usually why (or the usage happened on another device).