Why We Built ScreenBuddy
I was spending more than seven hours a day on my phone. Most of it was not on purpose. I would open Twitter, then Instagram out of habit, and twenty-five minutes would be gone before I noticed I had picked the phone up at all.
I tried a handful of screen time apps first. The hard blockers locked me out so completely that I deleted them within a week. The soft ones put up a limit I could dismiss with one tap, which meant I dismissed it every time. Neither approach survived contact with an actual habit.
What worked was a pause. Long enough that I had to decide, short enough that I was not locked out of my own phone. So I built ScreenBuddy around that, and my screen time is now under three hours a day.
John Gaffney
Founder, ScreenBuddy (J13 Digital LLC), Chicago
How it works
ScreenBuddy does two things.
Friction. The apps you pick stay locked by default. Opening one means completing a 25-second countdown with haptic feedback. You can still get in every time. The countdown just gives you the room to notice you are reaching for the phone, which is usually enough to put it down. If you want the longer version of why friction works, we wrote it up separately.
Limits that hold. You set a daily cap of up to two hours, with separate weekday and weekend settings. When the time runs out, your selected apps lock until midnight. There is no override button and no schedule editing while a block is active, which protects the decision you made this morning from the version of you at 11pm.
Friction handles the impulse. Limits handle the pattern. They solve different problems, which is why ScreenBuddy does both.
That is the whole product. If you want scheduling, cross-device website blocking, or gamification, other apps do those things better and we say so in our comparison posts.
Your data stays on your phone
ScreenBuddy runs on Apple's Screen Time and Family Controls frameworks. Your app selections, pause history, and usage data are stored locally on your device and never sent anywhere. We cannot see them, retrieve them, or sell them, because they never reach us.
The only information processed off your device is subscription status, handled by Apple and RevenueCat. There is no third-party analytics, no advertising SDK, and no tracking.
Fast facts
Try it
ScreenBuddy is on the App Store with a 3-day free trial on every plan.
Questions? The support FAQ covers setup, pricing, and troubleshooting.