Your phone doesn’t have to decide for you when you work, when you’re with your family, and when you sleep. Timekeeper lets you set it in advance — and then sticks to it even when the urge dictates otherwise.
Time Windows
• Set hours and days: “Work” in the morning, “Family Time” in the evening, “Sleep” at night — or any other window, every day or certain days.
• For each window, for each app: Open, Limited (Minutes per day budget) or Blocked.
• Default for each window: “Everything is open except…” or “Everything is blocked except…”
• Overlapping windows? The stricter one rules.
Websites — not just apps
• Same rules for websites in the browser: an entire domain (facebook.com) or part of a website (facebook.com/reel).
• This way you can leave a work website open without restriction, limit Facebook to ten minutes, and block Reels completely.
Shorts and Reels — Separate from the App
• YouTube can remain open for classes and lectures — and Shorts are blocked.
• Facebook and Instagram are restricted — and Reels are blocked completely.
• The “Identification Lab” allows you to update your identification yourself if an app update has changed something.
Your lock screen
• When something is blocked, instead of the feed you see a photo you chose — of the family, for example — and your own sentence.
• You can see why it’s blocked, how much time is left, and how many times it’s been stopped today.
“Relaxation” — the little invention that makes the difference
• The aggravation takes effect immediately. Relief — open something, increase a limit, shorten a window, turn it off — only after waiting.
• Choose: wait X minutes, “until tomorrow morning,” or a code someone else has.
• Extension from the lock screen: Press, wait (and the wait gets longer with each additional request), and get a few minutes. Up to three a day.
• The urge passes. What’s left after the wait is probably a real decision.
More research-backed tools
• Pause for breath: A few seconds of “Why are you opening this now?” before a restricted app. A study published in PNAS (2023) found that this small delay reduced opens by 57%.
• Silence notifications during a focus window.
• Gray screen during a window (advanced — requires one adb command).
• Adult website filtering: A built-in list of 64,000 domains in the browser, and the ability to enforce family DNS at the system level — no extensions, and turn off only through the cooldown.
• Statistics: Screen time, phone lifts, opens per app, seven days ago, and a daily summary at night.
Complete privacy
No account, no server, no ads, no tracking. All data remains on the phone. Uninstalling the app deletes everything.
About permissions
• Access to usage data — to know which app is currently open.
• Display over apps — to show the lock screen.
• Accessibility service (permission) — only for browsers and YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Telegram: Reading the address bar and screen structure to identify a website you have restricted, a short video you have blocked or adult content you have requested to be filtered. The service does not read other apps, does not save content and does not send anything. Without it, the app works — blocking entire apps and minute restrictions — only without websites and without Shorts/Reels.
Time Saver is a private and independent app from appotto.com.
Time windows, app and website restrictions, Shorts and Reels blocking, and your own lock screen.