How to block distracting apps while you study, on iPhone, iPad, and Android

To block apps while you study, start with what your phone already has. On iPhone and iPad, a Screen Time Schedule (it took over from Downtime in iOS 27) decides which kinds of apps are available during the hours you set. On Android, Focus mode in Digital Wellbeing pauses the apps you pick until you turn it off.

Both are free and take a few minutes to set up. They share two weak spots: the off switch sits next to the on switch, and neither knows when your study session starts or ends.

Disclosure first: this page is published by Kaizen, a study timer with its own app blocking. The phone's own tools come first because they are free and already installed, and the Kaizen sections say what it does not do.

How to block apps on iPhone and iPad

Apple's tools live in Settings under Screen Time. iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 replaced the two that matter here: Screen Time Schedule took over from Downtime, and Time Allowances from App Limits. Apple says both need version 27 or later on all your Apple devices.¹ Older guides, and a lot of search results, still use the old names.

A schedule for study hours (iOS 27 and iPadOS 27).

1. Open Settings, tap Screen Time, then Screen Time Schedule, and turn on Schedule. If Screen Time was off, it asks you to turn on App & Website Activity first.²
2. Tap Add Schedule and pick the days.
3. Tap the time window to name it, set when it starts and stops, and choose which Time Allowance categories are available in it. For a study window, leave out Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.
4. Under Always Allowed, add the apps you need at any hour.

The schedule works by category, not app by app. Under Time Allowances, Manage Categories shows which apps sit in each one, and lets you add a category of your own.

A daily cap. Time Allowances give each category a number of minutes per day. That limits a habit across the whole day. It does not protect the two hours you planned to study, because the minutes can run out before or after them.

On iOS 26 and earlier. The same two ideas are called Downtime and App Limits. Tap Screen Time, then Downtime, and choose Turn On Downtime Until Tomorrow or Scheduled. Apple's own guide adds a warning: "By default, Screen Time limits can be ignored once reached." To stop that for Downtime, set a Screen Time passcode and turn on Block at Downtime.³

The lock on these settings is a four-digit Screen Time passcode, set under Passcode & Management, Lock Screen Time Settings.⁴ You chose it, so you know it, unless a friend or parent sets it. Try the block once before you rely on it.

Guided Access: one app, nothing else. Turn it on in Settings under Accessibility, open the app you study in, and triple-click the side button on iPhone or the top button on iPad. The session ends with another triple-click and your Guided Access passcode, Face ID, or Touch ID, and a time limit under Session Settings does not let you out: when it runs out, the screen locks until you triple-click and enter the passcode.⁵ It is the closest thing to locking the whole device, and it only fits if you study from a single app.

Focus is for notifications, not for blocking. A Focus silences notifications from the people and apps you choose, and nothing in Apple's description of it stops an app from opening.⁶

How to block apps on Android

Google's tools are in Settings under Digital Wellbeing. Google notes that the steps vary by device, so on a phone from another maker the menus may sit somewhere else or carry other names.⁷

Focus mode: the closest thing to a study block.

1. Open Settings and tap Digital Wellbeing, then Focus mode.
2. Choose the apps to pause. Google's description: while Focus mode is on, you cannot use those apps and will not get notifications from them.
3. Tap Turn on now when you sit down, or Set a schedule to have it start by itself.
4. Take a break unpauses the apps for a time limit you pick. Turn off now ends it.

App timers: a daily cap. In Digital Wellbeing, tap App timers, then Set timer next to an app. When the time runs out, the app closes and its icon dims until midnight. Getting back in before then means deleting the timer. Google's page also describes an App limits PIN, a four-digit code that has to be entered before limits can be changed, on phones that have it.⁷

Pause Point, on the newest Pixels. Under Digital Wellbeing > Ways to disconnect, Pause Point puts a 10-second pause in front of the apps you mark. Google lists it for the Pixel 11 series on Android 17 and later, and says turning it off takes a phone restart.⁸

App pinning: one app, nothing else. Turn it on under Settings, Security, Advanced, App pinning. Open the app, swipe up and hold to open the overview, tap the app's icon at the top of its preview, and tap Pin. Unpinning takes the same gesture and your PIN, pattern, or password.⁹

Where the built-in tools give way

• They run on a clock or a daily allowance. A schedule blocks from 4 pm whether you are studying or on a bus. A daily cap can run out at lunch. Android's Focus mode can be started by hand, but it does not know when your session ends.
• They do not follow your breaks. If you study in rounds, the block does not lift for five minutes and come back. You switch it off, and then you have to switch it on again.
• The way out is right there. Turn off now is one tap. Deleting a timer takes a few. On iPhone and iPad the lock is a code you picked.

If your problem is two or three apps during a set block of time, the built-in tools are enough. Start there.

Blocking that starts and ends with your study session

The gap in the built-in tools is the trigger. A block tied to a study timer starts because you started studying, lifts when the break begins, and returns with the next round. That is how Kaizen's app blocking works, on iPhone and iPad and on Android:

1. On the timer screen, tap Block apps and pick the apps that get you. On iPhone and iPad, Safari websites count too.
2. Grant the permission it asks for. What that permission lets Kaizen see is covered further down.
3. Start a work session with the Pomodoro timer or the count-up stopwatch. Opening a picked app now shows a block screen that says the app is paused and until when.
4. Take your break. Breaks lift the block by themselves, and the next work session brings it back.

On the free plan you can block 3 apps, and pausing the timer lifts the block.

Studying at a computer? Kaizen's timer also runs in a browser and on Windows, but nothing is blocked there. Tap Block now on your phone instead: it blocks the same list until you turn it off, timer or not, through breaks and pauses.

What it does not do:

• It runs on phones and tablets only: iPhone and iPad on iOS or iPadOS 16.4 or later, and Android. Not on the web, not on Windows.
• It blocks the apps you pick, not the whole phone. On Android, the phone dialer, alarm clock, camera, Settings, and your home screen can never go on the list.
• Free covers 3 apps, Block now, and one schedule. On iPhone and iPad, apps and websites share those 3. Premium removes the limit on Android, raises it to 50 apps and 50 websites on iPhone and iPad (the most Apple lets one app block at a time), and adds the two stricter levels, Strict and Locked.
• Closing the app matters on Android. Swiping Kaizen away from your recent apps ends a session's block, and Block now, until you open it again. On iPhone and iPad the block stays up.

How to block apps at certain times: school hours and exam season

For hours you already know, like school hours, an evening study block, or the months before board and entrance exams, a schedule beats remembering to press a button.

The built-in options are the ones above: a Screen Time Schedule on iPhone and iPad, and Set a schedule inside Focus mode on Android.

Kaizen's block schedules are the same idea with their own app list for each schedule. You pick the days, all day or between two times (a block can run past midnight), and it repeats every week, even with Kaizen closed. You can end today's block, skip the next one, or skip until a date up to 90 days away. One schedule is free: the first one you make, with up to 3 apps. Premium runs up to 8. A schedule is Normal, which you can end or skip as above, or Locked (Premium), which cannot be ended, changed, or switched off once its block starts, apart from one emergency end a week, shared with Locked focus sessions. Schedules need Android 8 or later, or an iPhone or iPad, and they stay on the device they were made on.

On Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus, Realme, Huawei, and Honor phones, battery saving can stop a block: allow Kaizen to run in the background in your battery settings.

What starts each block, what ends it, and how hard it is to undo

The three Kaizen rows have one more exit that no setting removes, as with any blocker app: taking away its permission in Settings.

How strict should an app blocker be?

Two studies are worth knowing before you reach for the hardest setting.

In a six-week field experiment with 280 people, researchers tested an app that puts a short pause screen in front of the apps a person chose, with a message, a wait, and a button to back out. People backed out of about a third of their attempts, and over the six weeks they tried to open those apps less often. In a second experiment with 500 people, the option to back out had the strongest effect, the wait also helped, and the message did not.¹⁰ One of the three authors created the app that was tested, which the paper discloses.

In a four-week experiment with 36 people, lockouts that actually restricted the phone worked better than warnings, and also caused more frustration and pressure, mostly because real life kept producing reasons to need the phone.¹¹

Neither study was about studying, and they tested different tools. Read together they suggest an order: a little friction already changes what people open, a real lock changes more, and the lock costs more in frustration. So start low and tighten only when you catch yourself getting around the block.

Kaizen's version of that ladder:

• Normal (free). Pausing the timer lifts the block. Skip, reset, and end all work as usual.
• Strict (Premium). The block holds while the timer is paused, for a few hours if you leave Kaizen closed, and the app list and settings cannot be changed during a work session. You can still end the session.
• Locked (Premium). Strict, and after the first minute the session cannot be skipped, reset, or ended, apart from one emergency end a week. With the stopwatch, Finish unlocks once you reach your Focus Goal.

Beside the level sits Open anyway, a way through the block screen that you set up in advance and that is free at every level. You choose whether it exists at all, how many uses you get, how long you wait first, and how long the app then stays open. It has the two ingredients that worked in the second experiment, a wait and a button back. Nobody has tested Kaizen's version of it.

No level makes a block impossible to get around. On Android you can take back the permission or force-stop the app. On iPhone and iPad you can turn off Screen Time access. What a stricter level buys is distance between the impulse and the app, not a guarantee.

If company keeps you working better than a block does, study in a virtual study room instead.

Does your phone hurt studying even when you leave it alone?

The claim you may have read is that a phone on the desk costs you brainpower even when it is face down. It comes from a 2017 paper reporting two experiments in which the mere presence of a person's own smartphone reduced their available cognitive capacity, even when they managed not to check it.¹²

Two meta-analyses published in 2023 looked at the studies that followed, and they do not agree. One pooled 22 studies and found a significant overall negative effect of smartphone use and presence, noting that not every kind of thinking was affected equally.¹³ The other ran six meta-analyses on 56 results, from studies with 7,093 participants in all, and found a significant effect on only one of the functions it examined, working memory capacity, and none on the rest. Its author calls that limited support for an effect smaller than the theory predicted, in a body of research with generally poor statistical power.¹⁴

So treat it as contested. None of these studies tested an app blocker, and none can tell you how much a block will help your grades. Be wary of any page that puts a percentage on it.

What follows from it is practical. A blocker deals with apps you open. It does nothing about a phone that is merely there. If presence is what gets you, the fix is distance, and it is free: put the phone in a bag or another room, with Do Not Disturb on, and keep the blocker for the sessions where the phone has to stay on the desk because your notes, your timer, or your flashcards are on it.

What an app blocker can see on your phone

A blocker needs deep access to do its job, so it is fair to ask what it sees. This is how it works in Kaizen, which we built ourselves on both platforms.

On iPhone and iPad, an app cannot see your list. Kaizen blocks through Apple's Screen Time, the system's own mechanism for apps that block other apps. You approve access in Apple's own prompt, with Face ID or your passcode, and the device needs a passcode for that to work. You then choose apps in Apple's picker, which Apple's documentation describes as letting people choose "without revealing their choices to the app."¹⁵ What comes back is a sealed token. Kaizen can ask the system to block it and can count how many you picked. It cannot read the names. That is why the app says "3 picked" and never lists them.

The same design sets a limit: ticking a whole category in the picker covers the apps in it today, so an app you install later has to be picked again.

On Android, Kaizen asks for two settings and avoids a third. Usage access is the broad one: Android describes it as letting an app track which other apps you use and how often. Kaizen uses it to see which app is in front. Display over other apps lets it show the block screen. Before either, the app shows a plain disclosure of what it reads: the name of the app in the foreground, nothing inside it.

It does not ask to become an Accessibility service. Android's own documentation describes those as services that "inspect screen content and interact with apps on the user's behalf." Google built them to assist people with disabilities, through screen readers, switch access, and voice control.¹⁶ A blocker only needs to know which app is open, so that is all Kaizen asks for. It also does not use the permission that lists every app installed on your phone; the picker shows the apps you can open from your launcher.

On both platforms the list stays on the device. It is not synced to your account and not sent to us, which also means each device needs its own list.

What about your laptop?

Kaizen blocks nothing on a computer, in a browser or on Windows, so this part is about other tools.

On a Mac, Apple says that with Share Across Devices turned on, the Screen Time limits and schedules you set apply to your iPhone, iPad, and Mac, as long as all of them run version 27 or later.² On Windows 11, a focus session turns on do not disturb and hides flashing and badges on the taskbar; Microsoft's description says nothing about blocking apps or sites.¹⁷ For websites, the usual answer on any computer is a blocker extension in your browser.

Forest, the classic phone-down study app, has browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, covered with their limits in our guide to its alternatives.

Questions

What app can I use to block apps while studying?

Start with the one already on your phone: a Screen Time Schedule on iPhone and iPad, or Focus mode in Digital Wellbeing on Android. If you want the block to follow a study timer and lift on breaks, use a timer with blocking built in, such as Kaizen. If you want blocking and nothing else, a dedicated blocker app does that.

Is there a free app blocker for studying?

Yes. The built-in tools on iPhone, iPad, and Android cost nothing. Kaizen's free plan blocks 3 apps during focus sessions, with Block now, or on one weekly schedule, with no ads.

How do I lock my phone while studying?

To lock the phone down to a single app, use Guided Access on iPhone and iPad or app pinning on Android. To keep the phone usable but close the apps that distract you, use a block list. Kaizen blocks the apps you pick, not the whole phone.

Can you block apps during a Focus on iPhone?

Not with Focus alone. A Focus silences notifications and can hide Home Screen pages, but the apps still open. Blocking on iPhone and iPad goes through Screen Time, either in Settings or through an app that uses it.

Can I get around an app blocker?

Yes, on any phone you own. Built-in limits sit behind a code you chose. A blocker app stops when you take back its permission or delete it. Stricter settings add steps between you and the app, and for most people that is enough.

Sources

Kaizen's own behavior is described from the app at version 5.2.0. Apple's and Google's pages were read on November 11, 2026.