Fella blocks selected iPhone apps and tracks the progress that follows — total focus time, completed sessions, daily goals, streaks, and milestone achievements. No dashboards to decode. — in the UK
Blocking without feedback is binary: on or off. That stops the reflex to open a distracting app, but it leaves nothing to look back on. Fella pairs the same selected-app shield with lightweight visible progress so a finished session contributes to a visible record.
Progress is derived from blocking that actually happened. Totals are built from verified shield time and verified session completions — not estimates, surveys, or reclaimed-time math. Read how Fella blocks apps first, then see what that blocking history becomes below.
You see totals, today, streaks, goals, and achievements — and nothing else. Fella intentionally avoids analytics overload. If you want charts, heatmaps, per-app breakdowns, or weekly report exports, Apple's Screen Time or a dedicated dashboard product is the better fit.
| Signal | What it counts | How it is verified |
|---|---|---|
| Total focus time | All-time seconds whilst shield was applied | Accrued only whilst Device Activity reports the block active; paused during Emergency Unlock; persisted locally per day and hour |
| Today's focus | Seconds on the current calendar day | Daily ledger keyed by yyyy-MM-dd; today's total is today's entry, not a re-estimate |
| Completed sessions | Manual or scheduled sessions that reached their verified end | Deduplicated session ID; extension-confirmed completions for scheduled windows; daily counts per day |
| Today's sessions | Sessions that completed today | Today's entry in the daily session ledger |
| Current streak | Consecutive days with ≥1 completed session ending today or yesterday | Validated on each reconcile from dailySessionData; resets to 0 after a missed day |
| Best streak | Longest consecutive run ever achieved | Computed from sorted completed-day history; achievements measure against this, not the live streak |
| Goals + progress | Daily focus goal and daily session goal vs today | todayFocusGoalProgress and todaySessionGoalProgress capped at 1.0; weekly focus goals are Monday-first |
| Achievements | 19 milestone badges | Checked whenever totals or bestStreak change; records are append-only with unlockedAt date |
There is no reclaimed-time counter. Fella does not estimate hours saved, time reclaimed, or money value. The numbers are the blocking history itself — how long shields were applied and how many sessions completed.
There is no per-app analytics view. Focus time and session counts reflect selected-app blocking as a whole. Fella does not report time blocked per individual app, app-category breakdowns, or app-by-app usage charts.
Daily focus goal: 30 minutes to 12 hours, default 3 hours. Set it once and use it every day, or customise it per weekday. The app normalizes any value into that range and keeps a Monday-first weekly array so Monday through Sunday can differ whilst older installs still fall back to the single daily default.
Daily session goal: default 3 sessions. Sessions, not minutes, for people who prefer a count of finished blocks. Both goals display progress as today divided by today's target, capped at 1.
Progress is today's work against today's target. Not a weekly average hidden behind a chart. Home shows today's focus seconds and today's session count directly against the goals you chose — a simple fraction that reads clearly at a glance.
Change the target and the fraction updates. Use scheduled routines for when blocking starts; use goals for how you measure whether today counted. The two controls stay separate.
| View | What it means | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Current streak | Consecutive days with at least one completed session, anchored to today | Completing a session today increments it; missing today but completing yesterday keeps it; missing both resets it to 0 |
| Best streak | Longest run ever from your persisted history | Only grows; never decreases when the live streak breaks |
| Last completed date | Date of the most recent day that had a completion | Set from the latest key in dailySessionData with count > 0 |
No partial credit or grace period to configure. A day either had a verified completed session or it did not. That is the entire rule. Fella checks it on launch and on every foreground reconcile so a streak broken yesterday does not appear to survive overnight.
Every streak day is a scheduled or manual session that finished. Whether it was a timed manual session you started yourself or a recurring routine that Device Activity started and ended, the streak ledger counts the completion. See temporary sessions and scheduled blocking.
Best streak is what achievements track. A badge earned for a 14-day or 30-day streak stays earned even if the live streak later resets. The achievement records are append-only — a milestone, once granted with its unlockedAt date, is never removed because the live counters later read lower.
| Family | colour | Milestones counted against |
|---|---|---|
| Focus time | Amber (brain icon) | 1 hour, 10 hours, 100 hours, 500 hours, 1000 hours of total focus time |
| Sessions | Navy (seal icon) | 1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 completed sessions |
| Streak days | Amber (flame icon) | 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, 30 days, 90 days, 180 days, 365 days, 730 days of best streak |
No one-off checkmarks that lose their meaning. The app's earlier, granular achievements were removed because they were repetitive. What remains are duration milestones only — the two families stay visually distinct (amber for time and streak, navy for session count) without inventing arbitrary rarity ranks.
Every tile shows progress, then a date. Locked tiles outline a hexagonal badge to the fraction current / goal and label that fraction as minutes or hours for focus, count for sessions, and days for streaks. Unlocked tiles show the unlock date instead, with a locale-aware formatter.
They celebrate the totals that already exist. Check is called with resolvedTotalFocusSeconds, resolvedTotalSessionsCompleted, and bestStreak whenever those values change. There is no separate achievement score or points system layered on top.
A visible today gives the next session a reason to exist. When today's focus and session count are on screen, starting one more block has an immediate, countable consequence. That is a different nudge than reading a retrospective chart days later.
A streak turns an isolated choice into continuity. Consecutive days with a completed session produce a single number. Protecting it tomorrow is easier to picture than reviewing a detailed report. Fella shows it as a flame pill on Home with a detail screen for the count and best run.
Achievements mark a scale that daily numbers cannot. A hundred focused hours or a hundred completed sessions do not happen in one day. Milestones make that longer scale visible without asking you to interpret trends or compare weeks.
Less to interpret means less to avoid. The point is not to study focus. It is to start the block, finish it, and see that it counted. People who want to analyze usage patterns should keep using Screen Time alongside Fella — the iPhone app blocker itself stays narrow on purpose.
| Approach | Fella's progress | Detailed analytics suite |
|---|---|---|
| Primary numbers | Total focus, today focus, completed sessions, streaks, goals vs today | Per-app usage, pickups, category breakdowns, weekly reports, custom date ranges |
| Visuals | Counts, goal progress, hexagonal badge outlines | Charts, heatmaps, timelines, exportable graphs |
| Goal model | One daily focus goal (+ weekly per-day) and one daily session goal | Multiple custom budgets, limits, and warning thresholds |
| Feedback moment | During and right after a blocking session | Retrospective review days or weeks later |
| Derived metrics | None — shown values are the blocking history itself | Reclaimed-time estimates, productivity scores, efficiency ratings |
| Data explored | Achievements and streaks; no raw event log | Drill-down by app, time of day, or day of week |
| Best fit | You want a count that reinforces consistency | You want to analyze and optimise phone-use patterns |
Fella is on the left on purpose. The app's Position is stated plainly on how Fella works: one home screen, no analytics view breaking the day into charts and reports. Progress here is a supporting count for blocked sessions, not a replacement for an analysis product.
Screen Time still owns the detailed report. If you need per-app screen time, pickup counts, category time, or a week-over-week breakdown, Fella does not try to duplicate that. Its job is to keep selected distracting apps unavailable and show that the boundary is accumulating into something visible.
| Stage | What Fella does |
|---|---|
| Choose | You pick distracting apps once in Apple's Family Activity picker; blocking mode is saved locally |
| Start | You start a manual session, or a routine starts one via Device Activity at its scheduled time |
| Shield | ManagedSettings applies the system shield; Emergency Unlock, when eligible, is the only five-minute exception |
| Accrue | Whilst the shield is applied, Fella accrues focus time in daily and hourly ledgers, never during Emergency Unlock |
| Complete | When the interval reaches its verified end, the session ID is deduplicated and the daily session count increments |
| Streak | The live streak is recomputed from sorted completed days; best streak updates if the new run is longer |
| Milestones | AchievementService checks whether any of the 19 goals are newly met and appends records with unlockedAt |
| Surface | Home reflects today vs goals, the streak pill shows the live run, and the achievements grid shows progress or unlock dates |
Each stage is local and deterministic. Start and end dates, last-credited focus dates, daily ledgers for focus and sessions, and the deduplicated session-ID set are persisted in the app's standard and shared App Group defaults. Reconciles run on launch, foreground, schedule changes, and session events, so the same session cannot be counted twice after a relaunch.
Progress never loosens the block. Hitting a goal or unlocking an achievement does not add unlocks, shorten sessions, or change shield behaviour. The rule that makes Fella useful — selected apps stay blocked for the session, with one controlled Emergency Unlock when eligible — stays the same at any progress level. See Emergency Unlock and what cannot be bypassed.
The narrow job is the feature. Choose the apps, set when blocking runs, start or let the routine start, watch the counts and streak reflect that you showed up. That is the whole loop. The pricing is the same loop for everyone — progress does not gate features or tiers.
Fella tracks total focus time, daily focus time, total and daily completed sessions, current and best streaks, daily focus and session goals with today's progress, and 19 milestone achievements. Values come from on-device blocking history and daily ledgers.
Focus accrues only whilst a Fella shield is applied during a manual or scheduled session via Device Activity. Time during the five-minute Emergency Unlock is not credited. Focus is segmented by day and by hour, persisted locally, and reconciled whenever the app or its extensions run.
A session counts when its stored interval reaches its verified end, observed live or later confirmed by the Device Activity extension. Each session ID is deduplicated before the daily session count increments.
A streak is consecutive calendar days with at least one completed session. The live streak is anchored to today or yesterday and resets to zero after a missed day. Best streak is the longest run ever and is what streak achievements use.
Five for total focus time (1, 10, 100, 500, 1000 hours, amber), six for completed sessions (1, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000, navy), and eight for best streak (3, 7, 14, 30, 90, 180, 365, 730 days, amber). Tiles show progress as an outlined badge until unlocked, then the unlock date.
Yes. Daily focus goal is 30 minutes to 12 hours with a 3-hour default, and can be set per weekday Monday-first. Daily session goal defaults to 3. Today's progress is today's total divided by today's target, capped at 1.
No. Fella deliberately keeps progress lightweight: totals, today, streaks, goals, and achievement tiles. It does not offer analytics dashboards, charts, heatmaps, per-app reports, or reclaimed-time estimates. Detailed review belongs in Screen Time or a dashboard product.
No. Progress is feedback. Selected apps stay behind Apple's Screen Time shield for the session, with at most one five-minute Emergency Unlock when eligible. Goals and achievements do not alter shield behaviour, timing, or allowance.
