InsightOpen
Setup

Insight on iPhone.

Three things to set up, about ten minutes, and you only do it once.

First, what an iPhone can’t do

It can’t measure which apps you use, and it can’t block one. Apple keeps both behind a permission it grants to parental-control companies, and no amount of building gets round it. Android can do both; your laptop can do both. An iPhone can’t, and we’d rather say so than let you wonder why nothing appears.

What it can do is start and stop sessions, log a night’s sleep, quiet itself while you work, and interrupt you when you reach for the thing you were avoiding. Phone screen time still gets in the same way it always has, the screenshot on your dashboard.

  1. 1. Put Insight on your Home Screen

    In Safari, open Insight, tap the Share button, the square with the arrow, and choose Add to Home Screen.

    It opens like an app after that, without the address bar, and it’s where the session buttons and your sleep log live. Do this in Safari specifically; Chrome on iPhone can’t add it.

  2. 2. Make a Focus, and two shortcuts to switch it

    Settings → Focus → +, and make one called Study. Choose which apps are allowed to reach you; everything else gets hidden and silenced while it’s on.

    Then open Shortcuts and make two, each with a single Set Focus action:

    • One that turns Study on, named exactly Insight Study On
    • One that turns it off, named exactly Insight Study Off

    The names have to match exactly. Insight shows two buttons on the session screen that run them, so you can quiet your phone without leaving the app.

  3. 3. Bounce yourself out of the tempting ones

    This is the closest an iPhone gets to blocking, and it works surprisingly well.

    In Shortcuts → Automation → +, choose App. Pick the apps that eat your evenings, set it to Is Opened, and turn on Run Immediately. For the action, choose Open URL and paste:

    https://insight-study-sleep.vercel.app/bounce?app=Instagram

    Change Instagram to whichever app it is, so the page knows what to say. Now opening it flips you straight back out to a page that tells you how far into your session you are.

    Which apps to tick

    The picker shows everything on your phone, so here is the list the rest of Insight already blocks, your laptop and an Android phone enforce exactly these. Tick the ones you actually have; you only do this once, and you can come back and edit the automation whenever.

    Video and streaming
    Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV, Crunchyroll, Disney+, HBO Max, Hulu, Kick, Max, Netflix, Paramount+, Peacock, Prime Video, Twitch, YouTube
    Social media
    BeReal, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Messenger, Pinterest, Reddit, Snapchat, Telegram, Threads, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitter, VSCO, WhatsApp, X
    Games
    Among Us, Call of Duty, EA Sports FC, FIFA, Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, Honkai: Star Rail, League of Legends, Legends of Runeterra, Minecraft, PUBG, Roblox, Teamfight Tactics, VALORANT, Wuthering Waves, Zenless Zone Zero
    Memes and time-sinks
    9GAG, iFunny, Imgur
    Shopping
    Amazon, Depop, eBay, Etsy, SHEIN, Temu
    Music
    Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, iTunes, Music, Pandora, SoundCloud, Spotify, Tidal, YouTube Music

    One automation holds all of them, select as many apps as you like in the same picker, rather than making one per app. Anything you add to your own blocklist in Settings shows up here too.

    It fires every single time, which is more than a hidden icon does, but you can also delete the automation in ten seconds, and that’s deliberate. A blocker that hides its own off-switch is one you remove in a bad week, and then it protects you from nothing.

  4. 4. If you actually mean it, use Screen Time

    Settings → Screen Time → App Limitsis Apple’s own blocking, and it’s a real wall rather than a nudge.

    The catch is that you can lift it yourself in two taps, unless somebody else sets the Screen Time passcode. A parent, a sibling, a friend who won’t tell you. That’s the free version of a lock you can’t undo on a whim, and honestly it’s stronger than anything an app is allowed to do to your phone.

What ends up happening

  • You start a session from your Home Screen, or your laptop.
  • One tap quiets your phone for the length of it.
  • Reaching for Instagram bounces you back out, every time, with your session time in front of you.
  • Your laptop keeps measuring properly, and that’s where the insights come from.

Got an Android phone as well? That one measures and blocks properly, with no setup beyond two permissions.