AppBlock - Block Apps & Webs 4+

This app worked well enough in its free version that I went ahead and bought premium. It seemed to do great for about two days and then suddenly I was able to fully access all my blocked apps, during the time they should have been blocked. Not just cached material, either—full access to everything, phone overriding the app and rendering it completely useless.

The only way to make it work again is to disable the schedule and then re-enable it, which somehow reactivates the restrictions. Sometimes I have the self-control to do this and sometimes not. But I had been considering putting this on my kids’ devices, and now I know there is no point—they won’t voluntarily turn it on when it stops working.

I have read that Apple makes it extremely hard for 3rd party apps to have any control over your use, so I assume there’s just some kind of glitch between AppBlock and iOS. Four stars because when this thing works, it works fine; one off because it doesn’t work consistently.

Hello DD, Thank you for your honest feedback. Currently, we are experiencing issues with some Apple's extension. This issue also occurs in other applications and we hope that Apple fix it soon. We are still working on possible fixes and releasing new versions that should help. I hope you can understand. When the blocking gets more stabile, please consider giving us just a one more star. Thank you and have a wonderful day. :)

This app worked great a couple of months ago, but has become so woefully broken that I’m deleting it for good. I opted for this one (and paid for an annual premium membership) primarily for the Strict Mode feature. This app initially appealed to me for its advertised ability to run multiple schedules at a time with a Strict Mode that would not allow one to modify schedules/delete the app when schedules have been exceeded. There is a flaw with the App Usage schedules that will inaccurately “count” and disable apps as being in-use if you do not force close/exit them when navigating away from them. After a few months of owning the app and it working as expected, Strict Mode inextricably stopped working. At the advice of the app’s support team, I have deleted/reinstalled the app several times in the last couple of months to resolve these issues. This may fix my issue for a day or two, at most, before Strict Mode stops working again. The last straw was today when I went to adjust a setting only for the app to tell me my subscription has expired, when it doesn’t expire until July 2024. Comically, deleting/reinstalling the app resolves this issue only for a couple of days, before I was again shown Premium had expired erroneously.

I'm really sorry to hear about these issues. Our developers are currently looking into ways to make usage limit feature work more reliably as it is dependent on the information from the system and sometimes, when the system does not send the information on time, it can cause issues. We are doing our best to figure out another way to make use limits work even better in the future. As for the "premium expired" issue. We truly apologize for it, we have a discovered a bug in the sign-in feature, however, our developers already fixed it and it should work well now. If the issues persisted, plese try to sign out, restore purchase and sign back in. In case there would still be any problem, please contact us at apple@appblock.app so we can have help you accordingly.:) We apologize for the inconvenience! - Simona

Personally I downloaded this app with one intent, I wanted to set a time limit on Pinterest because it’s the only social media I have, and I was spending way too much time on it every day just scrolling aimlessly. It was such a time waster and I would mindlessly scroll through memes that I would forget in 2 minutes. I wanted to put a time limit on how much I could use it every day. That’s literally it. First, without premium you can only set it for one day out of the week. Boom, instantly useless for me. Next, the time limit is only 30 minutes it would be blocked, the rest of the time it wouldn’t be. That is also useless to me. 30 minutes is so little that I’d blink and be back on Pinterest scrolling again. I don’t really care to check out the other features since I didn’t want this app for that, and based off of this alone I’d assume you can do nothing without premium and I don’t really want to pay for that. I’ll just have to try to be stricter on myself and catch myself when I’m scrolling, or find an app that won’t make me pay for a basic feature like this in an app made for it. If you wanna pay, this app would be useful. For me, not at all. I deleted it immediately. That’s all.

Hello, I'm sorry to hear that you're not satisfied with our app. I have forwarded this issue to our team so we can discuss it and make some changes. If you have any other examples you would like me to bring out in the next meeting, please let me know at apple@appblock.app. If you're otherwise happy with our app, please consider giving us just a few more stars. Thank you and have a nice day.