5 apps to beat your phone addiction and unplug

Do you often find that you go on your phone for one thing and end up on Instagram (META) out of habit? Or that your finger taps on the TikTok app almost mindlessly? The One Sec app aims to counter that habitual urge.

Instead of instituting time-out limits on apps that you almost always skip without even a second thought, the One Sec app forces you to take a moment and take a deep breath before you decide if you want to go forth with viewing the app. It also quite subtly shames you by showing you how many times you’ve attempted to open the blocked app in the past 24 hours. Plus, you can put blocks on websites too, so that you don’t inevitably go to view Instagram in Safari (AAPL).

The app is free to use, but if you want to upgrade to the “pro” subscription, which includes the ability to put blocks on an unlimited amount of apps among other things, it starts at $19.99 per year.

Who doesn’t love a little friendly competition? The BePresent app gamifies screen time to motivate you to stick with your goals with leaderboards.

You make daily screen time commitments and earn points by sticking to them. You can also earn additional points by instituting time limit blocks on particularly distracting apps or by setting up “Present Sessions,” where all but a select few apps on your phone are blocked for the same time period every day.

In addition to app-wide leaderboards, you can also use the app with friends and family and make group-specific leaderboards, or select “accountability partners” who get notified whenever you go over your screen time goal for the day.

The app has a free 7-day trial but after that week, users need a $59.99 annual subscription.

One of the biggest problems with screen time management apps that use blocks is that it is really easy to just ignore or evade these blocks. You can often just choose to end the blocks, or resort to another device, or go on social media from your web browser instead.

Freedom.to combats this by syncing your app and website blocks across all devices you own, whether you’re an Android (GOOGL) or an Apple user.

You can start blocking sessions in the moment or schedule them in advance and have them recur at the same time every day. If you really have to focus on just one thing, and not just one app but the entire internet is a distraction, you can also use the Website Exceptions feature to block all websites except the ones you need.

And if you really need total elimination of distractions, you can enable Locked mode, which prevents you from ending a blocking session early.

The app has a free 7-day trial. After that you can decide if you’d like a monthly subscription at $8.99 per month, a yearly subscription at $39.99 per year or a lifelong subscription for a one-time purchase of $199.

Bright colors, sounds and flashes from your app icons, wallpapers and notifications are all meant to increase the dopamine hit and grab your attention, keeping you on your phone for longer than maybe you would have in the first place.

Dumb Phone aims to transform “your device into the helpful utility your iPhone was intended to be -not a doom scrolling machine,” the company says on its website.

It does so by taking the fun colors out of your phone and replacing them with a black and white minimalist home screen. The app also creates a widget that makes it easier to access your essential apps, like Messages, so that you don’t get on your phone for one thing and get distracted by the millions of other bright notifications and social media app icons beckoning you over.

Dumb Phone is free to try for 7 days. After that, it costs either $2.99 a month, $9.99 a year or a one-time purchase of $24.99 depending on which subscription you prefer.

Opal is like a mix of One Sec App, Freedom.to and BePresent. You can start focus sessions that block select apps and websites for your desired period of time.

The sessions have three levels of difficulty. You have your “normal” sessions where you can take breaks or leave the sessions early, and you have “timeout” sessions where you can still take breaks but after each one you have to wait longer before you can request another break again. You can also upgrade to a paid membership to do “deep focus” sessions that put hard blocks on the apps that you are not allowed to evade until the session is over.

It also gamifies the process, much like BePresent. You can collect gemstones the longer you spend using the app, and can add your friends to compare your progress.

And as a plus, it helps you track your progress by sending you detailed reports at the end of every week with metrics and actionable stats on how well you were able to focus, and how you compared to your friends.

Opal is free to download and free to use with most of its basic features. If you wish to upgrade your membership to have unlimited recurring blocking sessions, and the ability to have the “deep focus” sessions, it costs $8.29 a month.