Screen Time is the one connection that can act on your phone rather than just read it. It feeds your Focus score, and it's what lets a phone-free habit actually be phone-free.
It uses Apple's Screen Time authorization, so the numbers are Apple's own, and the blocking is enforced by iOS rather than by Beacon asking nicely.
What Beacon reads
On your phone, Beacon sees today's screen-time minutes, today's pickups, your weekly average, and a day-by-day history, all reported by iOS through a system extension. Those are what the Focus vital page and the "above average" badge are drawn from.
What reaches Beacon's servers is narrower: the daily total in minutes, and nothing else. Your pickup count and the per-category breakdown are read on the phone and stay there. There are columns for them in the database and they hold nothing, because the app doesn't send them.
The daily total is what the Focus score compares against your own 28-day baseline, so a quiet day scores well relative to your habits rather than against someone else's number.
What Beacon writes back
Nothing to Apple. What it can do is shield apps — the iOS-level block screen — for a window you've set up:
- A scheduled focus window, on the days and times you chose.
- A habit session, for as long as it's running.
- A calendar-triggered window, when a matching event begins.
You pick the apps and categories in Apple's own picker, which hands Beacon an opaque selection rather than a list of app names. A habit set to phone-free blocks everything, and that is only ever an explicit choice: Beacon never infers block-everything from a window with no apps attached, precisely because an empty selection is what a bug looks like.
History and freshness
There's no history import — iOS reports forward from the day you authorize, so the 28-day baseline fills in over the following month.
- Today's figure is provisional and can go down. iOS revises the day's total as it re-reports, so a number you saw at lunchtime is not a final count, and Beacon takes the latest write rather than the highest.
- A window whose end iOS never announced is dropped by time. The system's end-of-interval callback is documented as unreliable, so each window carries its own end timestamp and is pruned when that passes. This is what stops a calendar block staying switched on after the meeting finished.
Good to know
- Per-app detail never reaches Beacon. Apple's reporting runs inside a sandboxed extension that can't hand app-level usage back to the app, which is a limit of the platform rather than a choice, and it means a shield can be armed against apps Beacon cannot name.
- Revoking Screen Time access stops the scoring and the shields. Focus keeps the days it already recorded, and the block screens stop appearing.
- A shield takes your apps away on a schedule you set. Worth setting up deliberately: unlike every other connection here, getting this one wrong is visible immediately, in the middle of your day.