Screen Time App for iPhone — App Blocker With a Reset

The Pause — a short note from the person who builds Champ. Occasional, not daily; unsubscribe any time.

What a screen time app usually is, and what this one does instead

Most things sold as screen time apps are measurement instruments. They watch how long you spent in each app, total it, and hand the total back to you on a schedule of their choosing. The number is accurate and the delivery is useless: it arrives on Sunday, about a week you can no longer influence, and the best score it can possibly give you is zero. A scoreboard where the ceiling is nothing is a strange thing to check twice.

The decision the number is trying to influence is about two seconds long. It happens between the phone leaving your pocket and the feed loading, dozens of times a day, and it does not feel like a decision at the time — which is precisely why a report cannot reach it. Anything that wants to change the behaviour has to be present in those two seconds or it is arguing with the wrong thing entirely.

Champ blocks the apps you pick, offers thirty seconds of something else, and counts what you chose instead of scoring what you failed to avoid.

That is the whole of it, and the rest of this page is the two versions of the problem people are usually holding when they arrive: “which blocker should I install”, and “why does this feel like something is wrong with me”. They are different questions with different answers, so they get their own sections, their own tables, and their own honest limits.

App blocker: the one you will still have installed in three weeks

You have installed a blocker before. It held for four days, then it stood between you and something you genuinely needed, and you deleted it that afternoon.

Every app blocker on iPhone makes roughly the same promise and differs on exactly one question: what happens when you want through anyway. That single answer decides almost everything downstream — whether the blocker survives its first inconvenient morning, whether you start routing around it, and whether it is still on the phone in three weeks. It is a far more useful question than which framework the blocker is built on, because you will never once feel the framework.

Strictness is not a dial running from bad to good. It is a trade. The harder a block is to lift, the better it holds on an ordinary evening and the worse it fails on an unusual one — and the unusual one is the day it gets uninstalled. A lock you cannot open is excellent right up until your boarding pass is inside the app you blocked. A block with no resistance at all fails in the opposite direction: it never stops anything, so it is never tested, and within a fortnight it is wallpaper you tap through without reading.

So read the table below down the failure column rather than the strictness column. The row you will actually meet is not the one that describes what a design is for; it is the one that describes how it breaks.

Five blocker designs, by what happens when you want through. None of them is the right answer for everyone, and the last two are the ones Champ is built out of.

App blocker designs compared by what they are good at, how they fail, and who they suit
How strict it is	What it is good at	How it actually fails	Who it suits
A lock you cannot lift — a mode with no exit, or a password someone else holds	Holding through a genuinely bad evening. Nothing available to you in the moment removes it, which is the point.	The first time you need the blocked app for something real. The only exit is deleting the blocker, so one emergency costs you the entire system rather than one evening.	A window you have already tested and know you never need to override — an exam fortnight, a sleep block on an app with nothing urgent in it.
A schedule — chosen apps go dark between set hours	Hours you already know are bad. It needs no decision at the time, which is why it keeps working when you are tired.	Every reach that arrives outside the window, which is most of them. A schedule cannot see 2pm on a Tuesday that went badly, because nothing about the clock changed.	People whose problem has a clock attached to it: the late nights, the first hour of the working day, the gap after dinner.
A timer you start yourself	Protecting a block of work you have already decided to do. The commitment and the protection are the same act.	It is only running on the days you remembered to start it — and the days you would never have thought to start it are exactly the days it was needed.	Focus sessions and deep work, not the drift. It is a commitment device, and commitment devices are least available when you need them most.
A pause — a few seconds and a prompt before the app opens	Firing at the precise moment the decision is made, without ever making you feel trapped. Nothing to resent means nothing to uninstall.	Familiarity. A pause you have sat through four hundred times stops registering as a pause, and tapping through it becomes as automatic as the reach it was meant to interrupt.	Anyone whose problem is the reflex rather than the calendar — provided the pause has something in it by the time the novelty goes.
A pause with something in it — the same interruption, filled with a short practice	Surviving repetition, because the thirty seconds is worth having on its own rather than only as an obstacle.	It asks something of you. On a flat day, thirty seconds of anything can feel like more than you have, and you will skip it — which the app has to let you do.	People who have already worn out a bare pause and want the interrupted moment to become something rather than merely be delayed.

Where another blocker is the better pick

Champ is one option and frequently not the right one. These are the apps in the same space and the thing each of them does better, read from their own listings and support pages rather than from anybody’s marketing.

one sec
Reached the interception pause on iOS before we did, and its listing is explicit that it runs on Shortcuts Automation rather than a shield. It is the cleaner product — one idea, done well, free with a single app — and if a garden and collectible companions sound like clutter to you, that instinct is correct and you should follow it.
ScreenZen
Free, with per-app delays, open limits and session limits: more granular control than Champ gives away, at no cost at all. If price is the deciding factor, it is genuinely hard to argue with.
Opal
Scheduled sessions and considerably more detailed analytics than Champ has any intention of building, plus a Deep Focus mode its own pages describe as protection that cannot be bypassed or cancelled. Its pricing page also lists Android and Mac, which we do not have.
Forest
A focus timer rather than an interceptor, and its partner programme plants real trees. Champ’s garden is entirely virtual and should not pretend otherwise.
Freedom
Blocks websites as well as apps, using a device-local VPN profile alongside Apple’s Screen Time controls, and runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows, Android and Chromebook. Champ is iPhone and iPad only and has nothing to say about your laptop.
Jomo
Its Strict Mode is described as locking your rules for the days you set, and its block screen carries a message you write yourself. If what you want is enforcement rather than a gap, that is closer to the thing you are asking for.

App blocker — common questions

Does Champ actually block apps, or does it only remind me?

It blocks them, using Apple’s Screen Time (Family Controls) framework — the same system-level mechanism Apple’s own Downtime runs on. A shielded app does not open until you have dealt with the shield. What it is not is a lock: every shield has a way through, and the app says so during setup rather than discovering it with you later.

How many apps can I block for free?

Three, along with the 30-second reset and the wake/sleep dial. Champ Pro adds more shielded apps, custom routines and per-app rules. Three is a deliberate number rather than a teaser — picking the three that actually cost you something is most of the work, and a shield on everything is a shield you learn to ignore.

Can I get past the shield when I really need the app?

Always, and by design. You take a 30-second reset and then decide. A blocker that cannot be bypassed gets deleted the first week it blocks something that mattered; one that costs you half a minute gets kept, and the half minute is where the whole intervention lives.

Phone addiction: naming the reach instead of the number

You did not search for a feature. You searched because it feels like something is wrong with you, and a four-hour screen-time average looked like the evidence.

First the boundary, because it matters more than anything else on this page. Champ is built by a developer, not a clinician. Nothing here is an assessment, a diagnosis or a treatment, and the phrase “phone addiction” is used the way people actually use it — a habit that has stopped asking permission — rather than as a label with a clinical meaning behind it. If what you are carrying is heavier than a habit, software is the wrong tool and a person is the right one, and no feature list changes that.

With that said: the screen-time number is weak evidence for the thing you are worried about. It adds two hours of video calls with family to two hours of 1am scrolling and reports four, because duration is the only thing it can see. What is usually bothering people is not duration at all. It is automaticity — the phone was already in your hand before any part of you decided it should be, and the unsettling part is the missing decision rather than the total.

Automaticity has a shape, and the shape is legible if you catch it within a second or two of the reach. Which is the genuinely useful property of being interrupted at the door rather than reported on at the weekend: you are still standing in the moment that produced the behaviour, with the feeling that drove it still present, and you can usually tell what it was for. By Sunday that information is gone and only the number is left.

The table below is the one Champ’s own reset defaults are organised around. It does not score you and it is not an instrument of any kind. It is a way of asking what a particular reach was for, so that the thirty seconds you take next is a plausible substitute rather than a random one — and the last column is there because some of these are not screen-time problems at all.

Five kinds of reach, and what fits each one. The right-hand column is the one this app cannot help with, which is at least as important as the other three.

Kinds of reach for the phone, what each is usually doing, the practice that fits, and when an app is the wrong tool
What the reach felt like	What it is usually doing	Thirty seconds that fits	When an app is the wrong tool
Wound up. You want a feeling to stop, and you want it to stop now.	Regulation. The feed is a fast, reliable way to not be in your own head for a minute, and it never refuses.	A paced breath cycle. It needs no setup, no audio and no light, so it works in a queue and it works in the dark at midnight.	If the wound-up state is most days, and is not tracking with anything you can point at in your life, that is worth raising with a doctor rather than with an app.
Avoidant. There is something you are not doing, and the phone is the exit.	Escape from one specific task. The app is the nearest door, not the destination — which is why blocking it moves the reach rather than ending it.	One affirmation, picked close enough to the actual situation to land rather than being generic. It keeps the swipe your thumb already knows.	If the avoidance has stopped being about one task and is now most tasks, most days, that is a conversation with a person and not a thirty-second practice.
Flat. Nothing is wrong. There is just nothing to aim at.	Stimulation-seeking at low arousal. The feed is the cheapest input available and it is already in your hand.	Your vision board — thirty seconds of what you are actually working toward, which pulls attention forward instead of sideways.	Flatness that has lasted weeks and has taken sleep, appetite or interest with it is not a screen-time problem, and this app will not touch it. Talk to a doctor.
Restless in bed. You meant to be asleep an hour ago.	Delay. The scroll is the thing standing between you and having to lie in the dark with your own evening.	A short meditation, or a sound mix left playing with the phone face down and out of reach.	Sleep that stays broken after the phone is out of the room is worth taking to a doctor rather than to a blocker.
Habitual. You do not actually remember opening it.	Pure cue and response. There was no feeling underneath it — the thumb simply had somewhere to go and went.	Any of the four. At this end what matters is that the shield fired at all, because the reach had no content for a better-matched practice to work with.	Nothing here needs a professional. This is the ordinary kind, it is the most common kind, and it is the kind interception handles well.

Phone addiction — common questions

Is phone addiction a real thing?

People use the phrase to mean a habit that has stopped asking permission, and in that everyday sense it is plainly real — most of us can describe the reach in detail without being able to describe deciding to make it. Champ takes no position beyond that. It is built by a developer rather than a clinician, and it treats the problem as a habit loop because the habit loop is the part software can actually reach.

Will blocking the apps fix it?

On its own, blocking tends to move it rather than fix it. Take Instagram away and the same reach routes to TikTok, then to email, then to the news, because the urge was never app-specific in the first place. What changes the pattern is having a short, specific, ready alternative at the moment of the reach — which is why the shield opens onto a practice instead of a locked door.

How long does it take to change?

Longer than any honest app should promise, and shorter than it feels on day three. Champ asks for about thirty seconds, several times a day, and keeps a visible count of the ones you took. Its goal length is twenty-one consistent days to grow a tree, which is a pacing decision inside the app rather than a claim about how habits form in general.

What if I just tap through the reset every time?

Then the reset is telling you something worth knowing: the shield is sitting on an app you are not actually trying to change. Move it. Shields are most useful pointed at the two or three apps that genuinely cost you something, and tapping through is the signal that one of them is in the wrong place.

Go deeper

This page is the short version of three longer arguments and two feature pages. Everything below goes further into one part of it.

Frequently asked questions

Is Champ free?

The core loop is: shielding the apps you pick, the 30-second reset in all four of its forms, and the wake/sleep dial cost nothing. Champ Pro adds Focus Now, custom routines and per-app rules. The practices themselves are not what sits behind the paywall.

Does Champ see which apps I use?

No. Apple’s Screen Time framework hands apps opaque tokens rather than readable app identities, and that data never leaves the device. There is no screen-time dashboard on our servers because there is no screen-time data on our servers.

How is this different from the Screen Time limits already on my iPhone?

Apple’s limits are a scheduled cap that ends in a dismissible “Ignore Limit” button, and nothing happens in between. Champ intercepts every open of a shielded app, offers something to do with the interruption, and then records the ones you took. The difference is what occupies the gap.

What devices does it work on?

iPhone and iPad running iOS 18 or later. There is no Android version and there will not be one soon — the shielding is built on Apple’s Screen Time framework, which has no Android equivalent, so an Android build would be a different app rather than a port. The app is English-only for now.

Will it make me feel bad about my screen time?

That is the specific thing it is built to avoid. There is no shaming weekly report and no running total of minutes lost. Progress is the count of resets you completed, so the number only ever goes up, and a lapse takes nothing away from what you already grew.

What happens after the thirty seconds?

You choose. Continue into the app you opened, or close it and go back to whatever you were doing. Both outcomes are fine and the app treats them the same way — the reset counts either way, because the thing worth rewarding is that a decision happened at all.

Champ is free on iPhone: three shielded apps, a 30-second reset when one of them opens, and a garden that remembers which ones you took.

Shield the apps you pick — free

iPhone, iOS 18 or later

Last reviewed Sep 26, 2026. Rival facts were read from each vendor’s own listing or support pages on 20 September 2026 and are dated separately, because re-reading this page tells you nothing about whether they changed theirs.

One idea about screen time, every two weeks.