Every app you add gets a daily budget and, if you want, the hours it is allowed. Whichever runs out first closes it until the next opening.
The two limits
- A window is the hours an app is allowed, on the days you pick. With no windows at all it is open all day, up to its budget.
- A budget is minutes a day, counted across every window, spent whenever the app is in front. It resets at midnight.
- Together they are an and, not an or. A 30-minute budget inside an 8:00–10:00 PM window is 30 minutes, in that window. The rest of the evening is closed either way.
A rule with neither is not a block. Adding an app enforces nothing on its own — saving its first rule is what starts it.
Writing them
- Same every day is on to begin with. Turn it off and each window gets its own strip of weekdays: midnight on school nights, 2:00 AM on weekends.
- Past midnight. Set 5:00 PM → 4:00 AM and the row is marked +1. Furlough keeps it as the evening and the early hours of the next day, and reads it back as the one night you wrote.
- Visualize windows shows the week as a grid. Tap a day to see and change just its hours, then apply those hours to any other days. Applying adds to what a day already has rather than replacing it, joining spans that overlap or touch.
- Copying a rule works both directions. Use windows from another app pulls one in; Apply these windows to other apps pushes this one out to as many as you like, each judged on its own — so the tightenings land now and the loosenings queue.
Rows on the same days that overlap or touch are joined into one window when a time picker closes, so connected hours are always a single span rather than a pile of adjacent ones.
What Screen Time allows
Two limits come from iOS rather than from Furlough, and neither can be worked around.
- Fifteen minutes is the shortest window iOS accepts. A night counts as two — one either side of midnight — so each half needs its own fifteen.
- Nineteen windows across every app together. iOS watches twenty things at once and Furlough spends one of them counting budgets.
A window shorter than fifteen minutes, or one that overlaps another on the same day, is refused in the editor before it can be saved. You will not find out at midnight.
Changing one later
Tightening a rule applies the moment you save it. Loosening one waits out a delay, and the app is the only place that can tell you how long yours is, because it reads your own settings. Open Furlough and tap the question mark on the home screen: Why changes wait.
More: Apps and websites · All help · support@furloughapp.com