Bloom - Conquer Screen Time 4+

I’m quite happy with what this app does. Lately I’ve felt I’ve been using distracting apps entirely too much, sinking a lot of time into social media. Which is designed to be extremely addictive to push ads. Luckily I came across Bloom. The form factor is perfect. Keeping my bloom card in my wallet is just enough of an inconvenience that when the social media urge hits and and I see one of the many funny block messages, it’s enough to redirect my energy to something else. I’ve started learning game development again, and reading e-books in my spare time. After reading Atomic Habits, I can see why Bloom is much more effective compared to Apples own screen. I like that you can set up an allow or block list. I’ve set mine up to be pretty restrictive with few breaks using the schedule. And the emergency bypass cooldown is a genius way to add scarcity to greatly reduce the urge to use them. The app is great, fairly easy to use. But Apple needs to get their stuff together and fix the app picker. The selection limits and frequent crashing when setting up really hampers a new user. Best advice is to individually search each app you want to block/allow. Thanks Bloom team for giving me my time back, many thanks!

Wow, thank you so much for your detailed review. Happy to hear that the physical separation has worked so well for you. We appreciate your support.

I’ve been trying to find a way to change my subconscious minds relationship to my phone for literally years. This is the first app / device I’ve found that has everything I need. I keep the bloom card in my car, have it scheduled with no breaks / no screen time allowed during the day unless I tap the card.

I’ve used kitchen safe, brick, opal, one sec, forest, screen time with a password a friend set, grayscale color filter, deactivating Instagram, getting a dumb phone, and actually throwing my phone across the room but this is the only thing that helps me start my day in a healthy way. The only way I can access the dopamine drug that social media is, is to walk outside to my car and tap a card.

Feels similar to the guilt of going outside to smoke a cigarette and that’s how it should be! Next, have to figure out a system to not doom scroll on my computer. Thanks Bloom!

Wow! Those are awesome results. I’m so happy to hear this. Yes we intentionally designed this to be really hard to bypass. It’s great that our product worked better than anything else! Thanks again.

THE GOOD
Bloom has been excellent for helping reduce wasted time due to certain apps. The card is easy to carry in my wallet when I leave the house. Creating schedules is intuitive and flexible. It took a while to master the angle required to scan the card, but now it is pretty easy. I would say it would equally as well as Brick. The plus side is that the card is much more portable when leaving the house (who wants a brick in their pocket?). And the metal card is nice and sturdy as well; feels like a high quality card and looks cool. The app is very smooth when it works and has a nice user interface. I love the fact that there is no subscription.

THE BAD
Occasionally there are bugs with the app. Recently the schedules functionality started having issues. They don’t come on at their scheduled time, and have to be manually started. Obviously this defeats the purpose of a schedule. I’m temporarily blocking my phone manually with the card, but long term I won’t be able to use this product if the schedule feature doesn’t work.

Thank you for your review! Happy to hear you’re enjoying your product. I’ll look into this glitch with respect to schedules. Thanks again.