Looking for a Blank Spaces alternative?

Blank Spaces is a minimal Home Screen widget that lists your essential apps as text and interrupts the distracting ones, set up in about a minute. Paused is a different shape of app, so this is a comparison rather than a pitch — the table starts with what Blank Spaces does better.

Blank Spaces vs Paused, side by side

	Blank Spaces	Paused
Known for	Blank Spaces is a minimal Home Screen widget that lists your essential apps as text and interrupts the distracting ones, set up in about a minute.	Block Schedules that switch your chosen apps off at set times and back on afterwards, one-tap Focus sessions for right now, and a streak that counts the days you kept the block.
Genuinely better at	A calmer Home Screen. Blank Spaces removes the icon grid and badges that trigger opens in the first place.	Paused leaves your Home Screen alone and blocks the apps themselves during the hours you set.
Day to day it feels like	Your Home Screen becomes a short text list of essential apps instead of a grid of icons and badges, so the distracting ones are simply not in front of you.	A small, boring wall. You pick the apps, pick the hours, and they stop opening — no coins, no plants, no hardware, no reasons to type. A calm Paused screen where the app used to be.

Stay with Blank Spaces if…

…the look of your phone is half the problem. Paused changes what opens, not what you see.

We would rather you kept an app that fits than switched and quietly turned it off after a fortnight. A blocker you have disabled is not a blocker.

What Paused does not do

Said up front, because this is the part comparison pages usually leave out.

iPhone and iPad only — no Android, Mac or browser extension.
No daily usage allowance right now: Paused blocks by schedule or by session, not by “30 minutes a day” (Daily Limits are on hold because of an iOS 18 Screen Time bug that affects every app in this list).
Nothing to earn, grow or scan — if that mechanic is what keeps you honest, several apps above do it better.
Self-control for your own phone, not a tool for managing someone else’s.

What you get if you do switch

Block Schedules. Pick the apps, pick the days and hours — 10pm–7am, 9–5, dinner — and they switch off and back on by themselves. Set once.
Focus sessions. One tap blocks your chosen apps for 25 minutes, two hours, or until dinner is over.
A streak. Every day the block holds, the count goes up. That is the whole reward system.
A calm block screen. Open a blocked app and you get a quiet Paused screen, not the feed.
Privacy by construction. Paused blocks through Apple's Screen Time framework, which enforces the block without the app reading your messages, browsing or anything inside the apps. Usage stays on your phone.