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.
Two things soften that while you are still learning what a rule does, and neither is a way out of one.
- Your first week is gentler. For seven days after you first allow Screen Time access, a loosening waits one hour instead of your full delay. Everything else is real from the first minute — the windows, the budgets, the shields — and only the price of a mistake is held down. The week is granted once per install and ends on a date fixed the moment it starts; it cannot be extended, and turning Screen Time access off and on again does not buy another. Settings counts it down, so the first delay that is real is never a surprise.
- Fifteen minutes to take a tightening back. A change that takes effect at once — anything giving you less time — can be put back exactly as it was for a quarter of an hour after you save it. That undo is instant because the only thing it can restore is the rule that was already in force: it never reaches further back than the last thing you saved, so it cannot walk you out to something looser than where you started. Someone who wants an app open cannot reach for it, because before the edit that app was shut too. A loosening needs no undo — it is already waiting out its delay, and you can cancel it the whole time it waits.
Neither is a break, a pause or an emergency unblock. They forgive a mistake rather than a craving: the only thing either one can hand back is the state you were already in.
More: Apps and websites · All help · support@furloughapp.com