Every app blocker faces the same problem: to block your apps, it has to know which apps you’re blocking. That means it has to see your app list, which means it knows what you use.

Most blockers get around this by logging what they see, selling the data, or just… keeping it. Screeny doesn’t do any of that, but not because we’re nice. We literally can’t see your apps.

How Apple’s Screen Time framework works

Apple built Screen Time into iOS specifically so that apps can block other apps without seeing them. Here’s the mechanism:

When you pick apps in Screeny to lock, the system hands those apps to Screeny as opaque tokens: an encrypted blob that says “user selected something” but not what. Screeny stores that token and tells iOS “block whatever is in this token during these hours” or “block whatever is in this token for this much time.”

iOS does the actual enforcement. Screeny never decrypts the token. Screeny never logs it. Screeny doesn’t even know which apps are in it.

This is a deliberate choice by Apple. They built Screen Time so that parental controls, wellness apps, and blockers could all work without becoming surveillance tools.

What we could see, but don’t

To be clear: we could break this. If we wanted to log your app selections, we could intercept them before handing them to iOS, or reverse-engineer the tokens. It would be more profitable to do that than not.

But we don’t. Here’s what Screeny never sees:

  • Which apps you pick to lock
  • How many apps you pick
  • How long you use locked apps
  • Which apps you use most
  • Your app usage patterns
  • Your location, contacts, photos, anything else on your phone

Screeny runs on your phone, not a server. It has no backend to send data to. There’s no account. You don’t sign in anywhere. There’s nothing to log, nowhere to send it, and no reason to.

What we do store

The only thing Screeny stores on your phone is:

  • The opaque tokens (encrypted blobs, unreadable to us)
  • Your schedule preferences (what time to lock)
  • How long timed unlocks last
  • Whether Hardcore Mode is on
  • The keys you’ve paired (NFC tag IDs, QR codes, barcodes)

All of this stays on your phone. It syncs across your devices via iCloud Keychain if you enable it, but iCloud Keychain is encrypted end-to-end, so Apple doesn’t see the data either.

Why this matters

The “move fast and break privacy” playbook has worked for a decade. Most apps don’t tell you they’re logging your behavior. They just… do it. The surveillance is baked in so deep that it feels normal.

But normal doesn’t mean okay.

When you use an app blocker, you’re admitting something vulnerable: you want help resisting something. Most blockers weaponize that admission. They log it, sell it, use it to refine their targeting. You’re paying for a tool to help you focus, and the tool is selling your focus data back to the distractors.

Screeny breaks that cycle. It helps you focus without becoming a surveillance tool. Not because it’s noble, but because it’s possible, and once something is possible, doing it any other way seems broken.

The full privacy policy lives here. The source code will be public once the app ships. You can verify for yourself that we’re not seeing anything.

Because if we could see your apps, and we said we couldn’t, would you believe us? The trust has to go both ways.