Apps to stop scrolling, compared

Updated 2 September 2026

• A blocker acts on access, a pause acts on momentum, and a plan acts on the situation. They fail differently and can be combined.
• Opal is free to download, with in-app purchases, subscribing at £4.99 a week, £19.99 a month or £99.99 a year.
• one sec is free to download, with in-app purchases, subscribing at £2.99 a month, £19.99 a year or £99.99 once.
• Screen Time is a good instrument and a weak plan: it tells you how long, not which situation.
• The failure mode of every blocker is the same — the hours reappear somewhere the block does not reach.
• None of these three has a day counter, which is unusual for this subject and worth noting.

Blockers: acting on access

Opal's model is blocking the apps for a period you set. That is the strongest of the three levers when it fits, because it does not require you to be reasonable at the moment of use — the thing is simply not available.

The characteristic failure is displacement. Instagram is blocked, so the evening goes into the browser, or into a game, or into a different app that was not on the list. A blocker acts on a named target and the situation is not named, so the situation survives it. That is not an argument against blocking; it is an argument for knowing which situation you are blocking in.

Pauses: acting on momentum

one sec's model is a pause before the app opens. It is a smaller intervention and it is aimed precisely at the thing that makes scrolling different from most habits: nobody decides to do it. The gap opens, the thumb moves, and it has been ten minutes.

A few seconds of nothing restores a decision point where there was none. It works best for the reflex openings — the queue, the advert break, the moment after sitting down — and least well for the sessions you started on purpose, which is the honest boundary of it.

Plans: acting on the situation

The third model does not touch the phone at all. You name the situations it happens in — in bed, on the sofa, waiting, eating alone — and decide beforehand what happens in each one instead. Then you work on one of them at a time.

It is slower than a blocker and it is the only one of the three that survives the displacement problem, because the unit is the situation rather than the app. If the evening moves from one app to another, the plan is unaffected: it was about the sofa.

Screen Time on its own

Worth being fair to. It is free, it is already there, and its numbers are accurate. As an instrument it is fine. As a plan it does nothing, because the number it produces — four hours and eleven minutes — is one you could have guessed and cannot act on.

The useful thing to do with it is take one week's figures and ask which situations those hours came out of. That question is answerable in three or four days of notes, and the method is on how to work out the situations it happens in.

Combining them

These are not exclusive and the sensible arrangement for most people uses two. A pause or a schedule handles the access side, and a plan handles the situation side. The order that tends to work is plan first: knowing that the problem is the hour after sitting down tells you what to schedule, whereas a schedule chosen at random tells you nothing about anything.

The one place a blocker on its own is usually enough is the night, because the situation is narrow, predictable and repeats. That case has its own page: how to stop being on your phone late at night.

What Mini Breaks costs, and what it is not

£59.99 a year with one week free, or £9.99 a month with no trial, on iPhone, needing iOS 26. It does not read your screen time, block anything, or connect to any of your accounts — it has no way to and no intention of getting one. It holds a situation and a plan, and asks two questions a day.

If what you want is enforcement, a blocker is the right tool and this is not it.

This page is published by Mini Breaks, which makes a competing app, so read it with that in mind. Prices, platforms and mechanics above were read from each app’s own UK App Store listing on 2 September 2026 and are recorded with their sources. They change without notice, and nothing here is a judgement about how well any of them works. Check the App Store for what each does today.