What is Fold'em?

Two layers block, and a third holds them on

The first layer is Apple's own. Fold'em asks Screen Time to shield the apps you picked in Apple's picker, so a sealed app does not open and Fold'em's block screen appears instead. The apps are named by tokens the picker hands back, which is why the guided checklist walks you through searching for each one: Fold'em blocks exactly the apps you chose and nothing else.

The second layer is the web shield. Fold'em publishes an encrypted DNS resolver at dns.foldem.app, and iOS is asked to use it for every request this phone makes. When an address is on the shield's gambling list the resolver answers with nothing usable, so the page never loads, in Safari and in every other browser on the phone. The count the shield states for itself is 356,500 sites. Safari also carries a shorter list of ten named sportsbook and casino domains through Screen Time's own content filter, which is a separate mechanism with a separate look.

The third layer is not a blocker at all. It is your term and your keyholder, and it is what stops the first two layers coming off on your own say so.

What stops you switching it off

Protection runs for a term you set before anything starts. A term is ongoing by default, with no end date at all, or fixed to an exact end date at least one month away with no maximum. There is no control anywhere in the app that ends a term on the spot.

Leaving early is a road rather than a button. You send a request; your keyholder can keep the lock from anywhere in one tap, and that is the whole of the remote decision. A keyholder cannot approve an exit remotely. Approval happens face to face: you scan the approval code carried on their Wallet pass, standing with them, and the server refuses any approval that does not arrive that way. The wait of at least 72 hours starts at that approval, not when you asked. With no keyholder named, the request approves itself and the wait runs fourteen days instead.

Every one of those decisions is made on Fold'em's server. The phone learns what the server decided and applies the shields again; it never decides for itself, and it never reads its own clock to open anything. An offline phone stays blocked. There is one deliberate exception, and it is small: the optional Games category shield opens again on a 72 hour window counted on the phone, because that switch was never server owned.

Deleting Fold'em does not end a term. Sign in again on the same account and the lock comes back from the server exactly as it was. You can also turn on an optional app deletion lock, which asks iOS to refuse app deletion on the whole phone while it is on; switching that back off starts its own 72 hour window that your keyholder is told about.

What you see while it holds

Home is a wall with a safe on it. The safe carries one word for the state, a readout of the time left when the term has an end date, and four small lamps for the four things that can hold: the web shield, the apps, your keyholder and your witnesses. Under it sit the two things a term produces, the money you kept and the run of gambling free days, each opening its own sheet.

What this does not do

Fold'em is a commitment device, not a treatment service, and nothing it says is medical advice. It watches nothing: your keyholder sees eleven things and none of them is an app, a site, an amount of money or anything you typed, and the money figure is worked out on the phone and never leaves it.

It also holds one phone. A second phone, a laptop, a betting shop and cash are all outside it, and no app on iOS can reach them. Anyone with the phone's passcode, time and intent can take a block that lives on one phone apart. What Fold'em adds is that doing so is not quiet: the shields stop reporting, and the person you named is told.