The full answer
When the wait ends, the server marks your request as ready and stops there: your phone keeps every block on and shows you that the request is ready. Protection ends only when you end it, with a hold on a page that asks first. If you never do, the request closes after seven days and your protection simply carries on. Only a lapsed subscription ends protection without that last step.
The end of the wait is an offer
A finished wait is not a release. When the wait ends, the server marks your request ready, and that is the whole of what it does. It does not lift a block, it does not tell the phone to lift one, and the phone does not lift one on its own. Every app you blocked is still blocked while the ready request sits there, every site is still blocked, and the deletion delay is still whatever you set it to.
The reason is the one the whole product runs on: ending protection should cost a deliberate act by the person who committed to it. Something that ended while you were asleep would end the thing you asked for without you being present for it. So the ready request is drawn as a question with a hold under it, and protection ends at the moment you finish the hold.
The offer is held for seven days. Three different sevens meet around a request and they answer different questions: seven days is how long a keyholder has to reply before the request closes, seven days is the wait when nobody holds your key, and seven days is how long a ready request waits for you. If the last of those runs out, the server closes the request there, and your protection carries on as though you had never asked. Losing a ready request you never used costs you nothing but the asking.
Taking it, and what taking it does
Where the request is ready, the page is the last step. It asks End protection now? and says that gambling apps and sites open on this iPhone and, if you have a keyholder, that they are told. Under it, Available until a date says how long it waits for you, and Your gambling free days keep counting says what does not change. Keep protection is the filled button, and Hold to end protection, in red, sits under it, because the product puts the weight on staying.
Finishing the hold sends one message to the server. The server ends your protection, records it, and the blocks come off because the server said so, not because the phone decided the moment had come. Your history is not undone by any of it: the days you held and the money you kept stay on the record, and your gambling free count runs on from your last bet exactly as before. If the message cannot get through, the app says so and your apps stay blocked; if the request has already closed, it says that instead, and your protection continues. Every one of those sentences leaves the phone blocked, which is the direction this path fails in by design.
The one thing that ends protection on its own
Only a lapsed subscription ends protection without your hold. If payment stops, protection ends because the service ended rather than because you chose it, so the block comes off on its own when the lapse window closes, 72 hours after the entitlement ends, without asking you to turn anything. A ready request waits for your hold.
Two smaller releases also run by themselves, on the phone's own clock: the Games wait and the end of a Lockdown run at its set time. Each releases only its own layer, and neither ends your protection.
What this does not do
Ending protection does not delete your account, does not cancel your subscription, and does not clear the record of what you held. It cannot be undone: once the apps are open, being protected again means starting again. It also cannot be saved for later, because a ready request you do not use inside its seven days closes rather than banking anything. And no version of this control exists on any other device: it is done in the app, on the phone that carries the block.
Write to us and a person reads it. We answer within two working days, and we would rather hear the question twice than not at all.