Earn-your-screen-time apps

Looking for a BlockRot alternative?

BlockRot is another “beat brainrot” app: you earn Rot Gems by completing healthy tasks and spend them to open the apps you blocked. Paused is a different shape of app, so this is a comparison rather than a pitch — the table starts with what BlockRot does better.

BlockRot vs Paused, side by side

BlockRotPaused
Known forBlockRot is another “beat brainrot” app: you earn Rot Gems by completing healthy tasks and spend them to open the apps you blocked.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 atThe same earn-then-scroll loop as its peers, aimed at people who respond to a points system.Paused keeps the phone boring instead of turning it into a game: a Block Schedule, a Focus session, a streak.
Day to day it feels likeDistracting apps stay locked until you have done something else first — exercise, steps, a habit, a task, reading — and you spend what you earned in minutes.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 BlockRot if…

…you want gems to earn. Paused has nothing to earn.

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.

What you get if you do switch

Get Paused — free on the App StoreGet →