Not possible/Seek alternatives

:iphone:

Screen Time for iOS

I’m not sure if Apple has announced an API for the newly announced ScreenTime features, but it’d be nice to see how using my iPhone/iPad correlates with other metrics.

Not possible due to no API.

21 votes

Tagged as Mobile

Suggested 21 June 2018 by user Andrea Mocko

Moved into Not possible/Seek alternatives 22 June 2018

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  • 21 June 2018 Andrea Mocko suggested this task

  • 21 June 2018 Belle Cooper approved this task

  • 22 June 2018 Josh Sharp moved this task into Not possible/Seek alternatives

  • avatar

    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.

    15 July 2018
  • avatar

    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!

    12 March 2019
  • avatar

    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.

    17 March 2019
  • avatar

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

    19 March 2019
  • avatar

    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’)”

    27 December 2019
  • avatar

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

    27 December 2019
  • avatar

    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

    28 December 2019
  • avatar

    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
    
    29 December 2019
  • avatar

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

    25 September 2020
  • avatar

    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.

    26 September 2020