How can we help?

Open the Today tab and choose an activity to start your first block. Blocks keeps counting while you use other apps, so you can put your phone down. Stop it from Today, from your Apple Watch, from a widget, or from the Live Activity on your Lock Screen.

A category is a broad area of life — Business, Creative, Social, Personal, Health & Wellness are built in, and you can edit or add your own. An activity is the thing you actually time inside a category. A branch is a subdivision of an activity, for when one activity covers several distinct efforts and you want their goals tracked separately.

Five active activities on the free plan, with every other feature included. Blocks Unlimited removes the limit for $2.99 a month. Archived activities do not count toward the five.

Yes. Blocks runs concurrent timers and keeps one focused block, which is the one your Live Activity, widgets and complications display. Tap another running block to move the focus to it.

No. Every paused span is excluded from every total, on iPhone, on Apple Watch, in widgets and in charts. Pause and resume are available in all of those places.

Yes — add a manual entry with its own start and end. You can also correct an existing session's times, reassign it to a different activity, and undo a deletion.

Blocks recognises it and does not create a duplicate running session. Commands from your Apple Watch and from widgets are idempotent for the same reason, so a tap that arrives twice never double-counts.

Your own estimate of the hours in a week you can genuinely choose how to spend — after sleep, work you cannot move, and everything else already spoken for. Blocks uses it as a benchmark for Insights, not as a schedule. It never books anything for you.

Because they are answering different questions. Budget shows how you allocated your week. Insights shows where your time actually went, from tracked sessions. The gap between them is the whole point of the app.

Once. When Insights compares your tracking to the real hours in your week, overlapping blocks are counted a single time, so two concurrent timers cannot make a week look longer than it was.

Open Library › Settings › Scrolling, grant individual Screen Time access, and choose the apps, categories or sites you want included. Blocks never sees their names outside Apple's protected picker, never blocks anything, and never uploads Screen Time data. Exact history is rendered privately by Apple; Blocks also keeps on-device milestones for comparisons and daily goals.

Yes. The watch app browses your activities and runs timers offline, then reconciles with your iPhone when they are back in range. Commands are idempotent, so nothing is duplicated or lost in the process.

Open Blocks once so the widget can refresh from the shared database, then check that the widget is the Blocks widget rather than a placeholder. If it is still stale, remove the widget and add it again. On Apple Watch, make sure the Blocks complication is on the active watch face.

If a widget says it cannot reach shared storage, reinstalling Blocks re-establishes the App Group container that the app, the widgets and the watch app share.

Yes. The Live Activity has a privacy mode that conceals the activity name while still showing the running time.

It starts or stops the last block you tracked, without opening the app. Add it from the Control Center editor.

It reads workout durations and sleep analysis. It writes nothing — Blocks never requests write permission at all. Everything derived from Health stays on your device, and Blocks never uploads or synchronizes any of it. The single exception is one you control: Export Time Data has an optional switch, off by default, to include your nightly sleep in the CSV you share.

In the app's Health settings, map a workout type to the activity it belongs to. Where no mapping exists, Blocks can fall back to your Exercise time.

When several sources write sleep to Health, Blocks prefers an Oura source automatically, since it is usually the more accurate one. You can choose a different source yourself.

Settings › Privacy & Security › Health › Blocks, or the Sharing tab of the Health app. Blocks stops reading immediately, and works fine without it.

Subscriptions are managed by Apple, not by us. Go to Settings › your name › Subscriptions on your iPhone, or to apps.apple.com/account/subscriptions. Cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends to avoid the next charge; you keep Unlimited until the period runs out.

Tap Restore Purchases on the Blocks Unlimited screen while signed in with the Apple Account that made the purchase. If it still does not appear, write to us with the date of purchase and we will help you work out what happened.

Refunds are handled by Apple, at Apple's discretion — we cannot issue one. Request it at reportaproblem.apple.com. If something did not work as described, tell us too; we would rather fix it than have you ask for money back.

Nothing is hidden or deleted. All of your activities and history stay exactly as they are — Blocks only stops you adding or restoring another activity while more than five are active.

Restore the new phone from an encrypted iCloud or computer backup of the old one — your Blocks database comes with it. Blocks has no cloud sync and no account-based restore, so without a device backup the data cannot be recovered.

Delete individual sessions and activities in the Library, or delete Blocks from your iPhone to remove its entire on-device database, including the companion watch app's copy. Nothing you track was uploaded. If you opted into anonymous usage counts, switch analytics off in Library › Settings › Analytics before deleting the app; that stops collection, queues deletion under the random install ID, and retries later if you are offline.

We cannot — and that is by design. There is no diagnostic upload, no crash reporter and no way for us to reach your device or see anything you have tracked. The anonymous usage counts Blocks sends are totals with no names in them, and are no use for debugging. Describe what you are seeing and we will work it out from there.