RescueTime isn’t able to do much on iOS just because Apple doesn’t make that data available, it’s out of their hands. I’d honestly be extremely surprised if a Screen Time API was made available, because it’s not their MO.

It’s too bad Apple set this feature up but left it so half-baked. Is there any chance you guys might consider allowing manual entry for phone screen time?

Alternatively, would something like the app Moment (iOS) does work—using a screenshot of battery use by app to estimate screen time?

Thanks!

We probably won’t be looking into replicating what Moment does, as there’s a significant amount of work there for what would be a fairly small part of Exist overall. But you might like to vote for this suggestion for manual tracking, which would allow manual entry for phone screen time.

Hi Belle, thanks for the clarification, understood! Will do :)

RescueTime tracks mobile time for iOS, and while it drains the battery faster and requires continual location access, there is a way to access it from their API, according to their support: “Try adding restrict_source_type=mobile to your API queries. (the possible values are ‘computers’, ‘mobile’, and ‘offline’)”

Ir doesn’t seem to be working for me yet, but I’m working with their support and will keep you updated.

Update: Screentime for iPhone does work.

```python def get_mobile_minutes(date): “”“given the date as a formatted string, returns mobile minutes as an int”“” headers = {‘key’: api_token}

data = requests.get('https://www.rescuetime.com/anapi/data?key='+api_token+'&restrict_source_type=mobile&format=json&restrict_begin='+date+'&restrict_end='+date).text
minutes_spent_on_date = json.loads(data)['rows'][0][1]//60
return minutes_spent_on_date```

This will return the number of mobile minutes for a given date

Let me try making the code look better:

def get_mobile_minutes(date):

“”“given the date as a formatted string, returns mobile minutes as an int”“”

headers = {‘key’: api_token}

data = requests.get('https://www.rescuetime.com/anapi/data?key='+api_token+'&restrict_source_type=mobile&format=json&restrict_begin='+date+'&restrict_end='+date).text

minutes_spent_on_date = json.loads(data)['rows'][0][1]//60

return minutes_spent_on_date

With the info above, could the „not possible“ flag be reconsidered?

This suggestion is for the screen time feature built-in to iOS, which still doesn’t provide any way for us to access the data. RescueTime mobile tracking is a separate service.

Is this still the case? I came across an app called Clearspace which seems to access the Screen Time API on iOS.

If this app can do it, would it be possible for Exist to do it too?

There’s a bit more info here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44194120

As far as I can tell, there’s still no official way to access a user’s Screen Time data in the way we’d need to for Exist. My best guess about Clearspace is that they’re using a workaround to approximate Screen Time usage because Apple doesn’t actually allow access to this data. This kind of approach has a lot of downsides and isn’t a good fit for Exist, so we’ll have to wait until it’s possible (if ever) to access the real data directly.