How Quietly works

Why Quietly needs Screen Time permission

Quietly asks for Screen Time permission because Apple requires it before any app can shield other apps on an iPhone. There is no way around this and no third-party workaround. If you decline, Quietly can still hold your settings, but nothing will actually block.

What Quietly gets in return is deliberately limited. Apple hands over your app selections as opaque tokens: meaningless references that let Quietly apply a shield without revealing which app or category they stand for. Quietly never learns the names of the apps you picked, and never sees anything you do inside them. If blocking stops working one day, the permission is almost always the cause, and the help centre has the recovery steps.

Step 1: choose the apps that pull you in

You start by selecting the apps or whole categories you want Quietly to block. Three is usually enough to learn something. Everything you did not select keeps working exactly as it does now, including messages, maps, music and your camera.

You can change the list whenever you like, and each routine can carry its own set. That matters more than it sounds: the apps you want gone at 23:00 are rarely the same ones getting in the way at 11:00.

Step 2: set the hours you want protected

A routine is a set of apps plus a schedule. Quietly ships with two: Day and Night. Each has its own apps, its own hours and its own strictness, and each can be switched off without touching the other.

Night is the one most people set first, because the last hour before sleep is both the most predictable and the one where arguing with yourself goes worst. Day is the working block. Beyond those, custom routines let you protect anything else: a commute, Sunday morning, dinner, the two hours you keep meaning to spend on something else. Custom routines are part of Quietly Premium.

One thing worth knowing, because it surprises people: a block only applies inside its scheduled window. Outside that window the apps open normally. That is the design, not a fault. If you travel across time zones or the clocks change, open Quietly once so the schedules refresh to local time.

Focus, for when you want quiet right now

A Focus session applies your blocks immediately rather than waiting for a schedule. You set a length, it starts, and the screen shows the time remaining and the time it ends. Nothing else. No charts to check while you are supposed to be working.

Focus uses the same blocks and the same passes as a routine. It is just triggered by hand.

Step 3: the friction step

Friction is a short, deliberate action between reaching for a blocked app and the app opening. It exists because most phone use is not a decision. Putting anything at all in the gap turns an automatic open into a choice, and a lot of those choices come out differently.

Quietly has six friction methods:

• A countdown
• A typed reason
• A sequence quiz
• An arithmetic quiz
• Guided breathing
• Naming an intention

You decide how the method gets picked. Choose always uses one you selected. Mix rotates between them, which keeps the step from becoming as automatic as the habit it interrupts. Smart starts gently and adjusts over time.

Step 4: spend a pass, or don't

A pass opens one blocked app for a set time of 1, 5 or 15 minutes, after which the shield returns by itself. You get a limited number each day, and stronger routines give you fewer. A bedtime routine can carry one pass, or none.

This is the part that separates Quietly from a plain blocker. A block with no way through gets uninstalled inside a week, usually on the one evening it was genuinely wrong. A block with a small number of passes stays installed, because it never traps you. The cost is not guilt. It is arithmetic: you have a few, and spending one on a reflex is obvious in a way that tapping an icon is not.

Running out is information rather than punishment. If you reached the end of your passes by 14:00, that is worth knowing.

Apps for a better moment

You can nominate up to three constructive alternatives, and after a blocked-app interruption Quietly may offer to open one of them instead. Opening an alternative never costs a pass.

The reason this exists: the reflex that reached for the phone is usually looking for a gap to fill, not for that specific app. Giving it something else to land on is easier than giving it nothing.

What Quietly shows you afterwards

Quietly counts the days your routines held. That is the whole of it. There is no score, no rank and no streak that punishes you for one bad Tuesday, because a streak is just another number to defend.

Weekly screen time totals are a famously blunt measure anyway. Two hours of video calls and two hours of half-attentive scrolling look identical in a report. The more useful question is which openings you would have chosen if someone had asked you first, and a count of protected days gets closer to that than a bar chart does.

What Quietly knows about you

There is no Quietly account and no cloud profile. Your routines and settings live on the phone, and deleting the app removes them. Quietly does not sell personal information and does not use it for advertising or cross-app tracking.

Quietly does collect a limited amount of diagnostic and usage data, such as crash reports and which features get used, to find faults and understand what people actually use. It is not linked to your identity, and it never includes the apps you selected or anything you typed.

Purchases go through Apple's StoreKit, so Apple handles billing and Quietly sees only opaque tokens. The full detail is in the privacy policy.