Almost every blocker on the market can be switched off by the person it’s meant to stop. A snooze button, a password you set yourself, a five-minute override, or simply quitting the app. At 11pm none of that matters. At 1am it’s the whole game.
The honest reason is that a blocker with no escape hatch generates support tickets, and an escape hatch that’s hard to reach generates angry ones. So the category settled on locks that open from the inside, and everyone agreed to call that a feature.
If blocking lives entirely inside one running app, force-quitting it ends the block. No amount of interface design fixes that.
A passcode you chose is a passcode you can type. Screen Time works exactly this way, which is why it stops nobody who set it for themselves.
“Five more minutes” is a button. Cooling-off delays just move the moment of surrender a few minutes later.
This is the same demo that runs on the front page. Nothing here is a mock-up of a mock-up — each answer is what the app actually does.
It’s 1:14am. The lock is on. Pick your move.
Try to get out of it.
Nothing here is a mock-up of a mock-up — every answer is what the app actually does.
Worth being precise, because the phrase gets used loosely. On macOS, no third-party app can make itself genuinely undeletable — that requires an Apple entitlement most apps will never be granted, and anything claiming otherwise is either using device management or overstating.
What Sleep Well does instead is remove every escape that matters during the night you committed to. Quit is refused. A force-kill is undone by a background helper. The wake time is locked when the night starts, so editing the schedule changes tomorrow rather than tonight. Rebooting doesn’t clear it, because the night is written to disk.
The escape that remains is deliberate: a USB key holding a random 256-bit secret, which the design expects you to have already handed to someone else. A lock nobody can open is a brick. A lock only someone else can open is a commitment.
How the physical-key model works, and why handing it away is the point rather than a workaround.
What macOS actually allows, and how a bedtime lock survives Spaces, extra monitors, sleep and restart.
No — and the reason is a hard limit in iOS rather than an oversight.