I can't stop gambling online. What actually stops me

The limit, before anything else

The phone belongs to you. Every restriction on it is a setting you granted and can withdraw, and Apple does not offer any app a way to stop that. So the honest sentence is that no blocker can make gambling impossible on an iPhone, and the products that talk as though one can are selling you a feeling.

That is not a reason to skip it. It is the reason to look at what a block actually changes, which is not whether it is possible but what it costs, and to whom.

What is really in the way at the moment it happens

Play the last time forward in your head. The gap between deciding and playing was probably a few seconds: unlock, tap, done. If a block was in place, the gap was still a few seconds, because removing the block was also unlock, tap, done.

Everything below is one answer to one question, which is how long that gap can be made and who else has to be involved in shortening it. It is a small question and it turns out to carry most of the weight, because the version of you at that moment is working on a budget of seconds rather than of resolve.

The three layers

They are separate mechanisms with separate failure modes, which is why they are named separately rather than sold as one word.

The apps refuse to open. You pick betting apps in Apple's own picker and Screen Time shields them: tapping one draws a block screen over it instead of opening it, and there is no control on that screen that continues. The picker hands over opaque tokens rather than names, so the count of what you sealed leaves the phone and the identities never do. It is always on, with no schedule and no daily window.

The addresses fail to load. An encrypted DNS setting points every lookup this phone makes at a resolver that answers about 356,500 known gambling domains with 0.0.0.0, the address for nowhere. That covers every browser on the phone, browsers living inside other apps included, and it needs no tunnel. It matters because an app you cannot open is a website you can.

The undo is not on the phone. The record of the term lives on the server, and the server is what decides when protection comes off. The phone reads that answer and applies it. Its own clock is not an input, so turning the phone off, flying, or changing the date in Settings changes nothing at all. How the blocking works is the fuller account of all three.

The part that changes the arithmetic

Layers one and two are settings, and a setting you can change is a promise rather than a commitment. The third layer is where the cost goes.

You ask to leave inside the app, and the request goes to the server. If you named somebody as keyholder, they either keep the lock, which is one tap from anywhere, or they approve in person, which means standing with you while you scan a code carried on their Wallet pass. There is no approve button on any page, in any email or on the pass. An approval starts a wait of at least 72 hours counted from the moment they said yes.

Two things are worth knowing before you decide this is too much. An early exit does not depend on somebody's permission: if a keyholder says nothing for seven days, the request approves itself and is recorded as though you had none, and the wait becomes fourteen days rather than 72 hours. Without a keyholder at all, the request approves itself immediately and the wait is the same fourteen days. So nobody can hold you in against your will. What they can do is make the fast route slower than the moment that wanted it.

At the end of any wait the server marks a release you still have to take, and nothing opens by itself. The release is held for thirty days, and if you never take it your protection carries on.

What the other person actually sees

This is the question that decides whether anybody says yes, so it is worth reading rather than guessing. A keyholder is shown a short list of status, counts, dates and event kinds, and it is written out in full in one place rather than paraphrased on five: what my keyholder sees.

What is not in it: which apps or sites you sealed, anything you browse, any amount of money, anything you typed. There is no spend figure anywhere in what the server sends a second person, so there is nothing for a page or a pass to show them by accident. That is deliberate, and it is the reason a person is willing to hold a key at all. A tool that reported your browsing to somebody would be a monitoring tool, and nobody hands the key to one of those.

What reaches them by email is narrow and listed in one place: your request to leave early, the three integrity events, which are protection going off, a phone that stopped confirming for 24 hours, and a lapsed subscription, and two optional kinds you can switch off, milestone days and busy stretches of blocked attempts. Every letter a keyholder can receive is written out there. One weakening is deliberately not among the integrity events, and it is fair to know which: switching the encrypted DNS setting off in iOS Settings sends no email, and on a phone whose apps are sealed it changes nothing on their pass either.

What none of this is

It is not treatment, and it does not claim to reduce anybody's urge to gamble. It is a commitment device: it moves one decision from a bad moment to a calmer one and puts a second person in the loop. It holds one iPhone, so a second phone, a laptop, a shop and cash are outside it, and a calm status on somebody's pass is a statement about one device rather than about a person.

If the question underneath this page is closer to whether it has become a problem, or to what to do with the feeling itself rather than with the phone, the helplines at the foot are free, they are not run by us, and they answer whether or not you install anything. What a cool down is for is the page about the moment rather than the mechanism.