Bedside: Sleep App Blocker

One-time purchase, never a subscription. Free with ads; a single unlock removes them for good. Limited unlocks at night — but a real emergency always gets through.

You're not awake because you're not tired. You're awake because you're still scrolling.

Bedside blocks the apps that keep you up — during the sleep window you set, and only then.

ONE-TIME PURCHASE. NO SUBSCRIPTION. The core works free, with ads. A single purchase removes them for good and unlocks multiple sleep windows, multiple break rules, and the guardian password. No yearly bill, no plan to cancel, no account to make. Comparable apps in this category charge a subscription every year, and their buy-once tiers cost many times this.

SLEEP WINDOW Pick a time range and the apps that derail your night — social, video, news, games, your call. They're blocked from bedtime until morning. The phone stops calling you back.

PERIODIC BREAK Tracks each app's continuous use independently. Fifteen straight minutes on any one of them triggers a fifteen-minute cooldown. It pulls you out of the doomscroll before the hour disappears.

LIMITED UNLOCKS, NEVER A DEAD-END Getting in during a blocked window takes a small deliberate task first — just enough to lose interest if you're sleepy. A real emergency always gets through; it only has to wait for you to actually stop and think. The door is never welded shut, because a tool that traps you is a tool you delete.

A MORNING RECAP, NOT A VERDICT The next morning Bedside shows how last night went compared to the one before. No score, no streak to break, no guilt notification. Just progress you can see — which is the reason people are still using it on night four.

WRITE THE BLOCK SCREEN YOURSELF Don't like our wording? Replace the title and subtitle with your own goal. Add several lines and they rotate at random, because any single sentence stops working around the fortieth time you read it.

PRIVACY Built on Apple's Family Controls framework and runs on-device. Your rules, app selections and usage never leave your phone — no account, no server of ours. The free version shows ads (never during sleep hours, and never the moment you pause); the one-time purchase removes them and loads no third-party SDKs at all.

For anyone who has tried deleting the app, tried promising themselves, tried the built-in screen time limit and switched it off.