Privacy Policy
Effective 4 November 2026 · applies to Screen Limiter for iOS
The short version: Screen Limiter has no account, no server and no analytics. Everything it knows lives on your phone. Nothing about you or your apps is transmitted, because the app has no networking code to transmit it with.
What Screen Limiter stores
All of the following is written to the app's private storage on your device, and to a shared container that only Screen Limiter and its own iOS extensions can read:
- Your groups and their settings — the name you give a group, its colour and symbol, its allowance, its window length, its strictness, the days and hours it runs.
- Opaque app tokens — the identifiers Apple's Screen Time framework gives an app instead of app names. iOS can turn a token into a display name on this device (that is how Screen Limiter suggests a name for a new group); anywhere else the token is meaningless.
- A seven-day log of outcomes — which windows you stayed under a limit and which you went over, so the Insights tab can show your week. It stores the result of a window, never which apps you opened inside it.
- Preferences — language, theme, whether the animated background is on.
- An optional passcode — only a salted SHA-256 hash, kept in the iOS keychain, along with the salt. The passcode itself is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash. If you use Parent Mode, the answer to your security question is stored the same way.
What Screen Limiter does not do
- It does not create an account, and there is nothing to sign into.
- It does not send data anywhere. Screen Limiter contains no networking code, no analytics SDK, no crash reporter and no advertising framework.
- It does not send which apps you chose anywhere. iOS gives Screen Limiter an opaque token, and the phone can resolve that token into a name locally, but no app name, token or web domain ever leaves the device.
- It does not read your browsing history, your messages, your photos or your location, and it does not ask for permission to.
- It does not show ads, and it does not share data with anyone for advertising.
- It does not track you across other apps or websites. Apple's App Tracking Transparency prompt is not required, because there is no tracking to ask about.
The usage card on Insights
Insights can show a week of real screen time by category. Those numbers are handed by iOS to a small report extension inside Screen Limiter, which draws the card itself. The numbers are never written to storage and never sent anywhere, and the main app is not allowed to read them back — it only hands iOS a date range and gets a picture in return. This is the only place the app displays real usage, and it is why the rest of Insights counts windows rather than minutes.
Notifications
Screen Limiter can send one local notification: a nudge when your minutes come back, and only if the previous window was actually spent. It is off by default, it is scheduled by iOS on this device, and it involves no server. Turning it off stops it immediately.
Screen Time permission
Screen Limiter asks for Screen Time access the first time you create a limit. That permission is what lets iOS enforce a shield on the apps you picked and tell Screen Limiter when a time window ends. You can review or withdraw it at any time in iOS Settings. Without it, Screen Limiter cannot block anything.
Children
Screen Limiter is not directed at children under 13, and it does not knowingly collect information from anyone. Parent Mode exists so that a parent or guardian can set a passcode on a device they manage and keep the child from changing the settings. Everything Parent Mode protects stays on that device.
Deleting your data
Deleting the app deletes everything: your groups, your history, your preferences and the stored passcode hash. There is no copy anywhere else, so there is nothing to request and no account to close. If you remove the passcode in Settings, the stored hash is deleted immediately.
Purchases
This version of Screen Limiter has no in-app purchases, no subscriptions and no payment processing. If a paid tier is introduced later, purchases will be handled by Apple, and this page will be updated before anything changes.
Changes to this policy
If the app starts handling data differently, this page will say so plainly and the effective date will change. There is no mailing list to notify you through, which is itself a consequence of collecting nothing.
Contact
Questions about this policy, or about anything the app does with your data: hello@screenlimiter.com.
Screen Limiter is an independent app. It is not affiliated with Apple Inc. Screen Time, Family Controls, Device Activity and Managed Settings are Apple technologies, used under Apple's developer terms.