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

• 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 your protection lives on the server, and the server is what decides when protection comes off. The phone reads that answer and applies it, so turning the phone off, flying, or changing the date in Settings does not end your protection. 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 end protection inside the app, and the request goes to the server. If you named somebody as keyholder, it reaches them in Fold’em on their own iPhone. They either say no, which is a tap and Face ID in their app, or they agree in person: their app shows an approval code and you scan it with yours while you stand together. No web page and no email can agree for them. An agreement starts a wait of 48 hours counted from the moment they said yes.

Two things are worth knowing before you decide this is too much. Silence is not a back door: if a keyholder says nothing for seven days the request closes rather than granting anything, so a keyholder who never answers is a keyholder who left protection on. And if you never named one, nobody is deciding anything: the request is ready seven days after you made it. So ending protection with a keyholder costs a conversation, and without one it costs a week.

At the end of either wait the server marks a release you still have to take, and nothing opens by itself. A release nobody turns closes again after seven days, and 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 except a note you add when you ask your keyholder to end a Lockdown sooner. There is no spend figure anywhere in what the server sends a second person, so there is nothing for a screen 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.

They use Fold’em on their own iPhone, signed in to their own account. Which kinds of alert ring their phone is theirs to set in their own Settings, and your request to end protection always reaches them whatever those switches say: which updates a keyholder gets is written out there. Screen Time switched off shows on their card for you: it reads Protection off.

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, if you name one, 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 card 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 the wait is for is the page about the moment rather than the mechanism.