Pause vs Verboten

Most blockers let you turn them off the second you want to. Pause doesn't have to. Pick the apps. Pick how hard they are to reach. Get on with your life. DESIGNED FOR REAL LIFE Studying — A Time Limit on social apps, so a five-minute check can't turn into fifty. Deep work — Start a Session before you sit down and the apps that break your focus are gone until you end it. Evenings — A Schedule that blocks the doomscroll apps every night after dinner, automatically. The one app you reach for without thinking — A Friction Lock. Never blocked outright, just never one tap away again. When you know you'll cave — Strict Mode. Once it's running, it can't be switched off, edited, or quietly emptied out until it ends. FIVE WAYS TO BLOCK Session — Block now, for 30 minutes or until you say stop. Schedule — Block on a repeating timetable. Nine to five on weekdays, or every evening after eight. Time Limit — Give an app a daily budget. Forty-five minutes, then it's gone for the day. Open Limit — Cap how many times you can open it. Five opens a day, not fifty. Friction Lock — Solve a challenge first, every single time. Mix them. A Time Limit on Instagram, a Schedule across your work hours, a Friction Lock on the one you reach for without thinking. APP LISTS Build a list once — individual apps, whole categories, and websites — then point any rule at it. Change the list and every rule using it updates. WEBSITES TOO Add domains by hand. Safari and other browsers get the same shield your apps do. UNLOCKS, IF YOU WANT THEM Allow yourself a set number of unlocks per day, each lasting as long as you choose. Or allow none at all. YOUR OWN WORDS ON THE BLOCK SCREEN The shield shows a line you picked. Choose from the built-in set or write your own. INSIGHTS See where the hours actually went, and how often you stayed out. RULE HEALTH One screen listing every rule and whether it is genuinely armed. No silent failures. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT No account. No email. No sign-up. Your app lists, rules and history stay on your device. Pause uses Apple's Screen Time framework, so your app selections are handled by iOS and never sent to us. REQUIRES iOS 17 or later, and Screen Time permission — Pause cannot block anything without it.

Verboten blocks the apps you choose. You pick them once, and they stop opening. Not a timer you can dismiss. Not a nag screen. iOS itself holds the door, through the same Screen Time machinery Apple uses for parental controls, so a blocked app meets a shield instead of a feed, and there is nothing to swipe past. WHAT IT DOES Pick your apps. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever your evenings disappear into. One switch holds all of them. Block only when it matters. Add a window — evenings, work hours, overnight — and blocking applies then and not otherwise. A window can cover every app or a single one. With no window, it is simply always on. Two minutes, not the evening. Need an app right now? Take a couple of minutes. It shuts again by itself, and the setting returns to Never — so a moment of weakness never quietly becomes a permanent exception. Pause on your terms. Everything opens for as long as you chose, then blocking comes back on its own. No decision to remember. Something better to read. An optional bulletin of the day's AI news from real newsrooms — grouped so one story isn't repeated five times, and ten stories long. It ends, which is the whole point. Turn it off and the app fetches nothing at all. A line worth reading. Every block shows one: a fact, a thought, a reason to look away. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account. No sign-in. No analytics, no ads, no trackers. Nothing about you leaves your phone. Your blocked list, your schedules and your settings live on the device. On iOS the app cannot even read which apps you picked; Apple hands it opaque tokens, and that is all it ever sees. No guilt. Missing your own rules is not a failure state. There is no streak to break and no score to lose. Verboten is made by the ReadLoft team.