Looking for a Roots alternative?

Roots offers one-tap blocking, app limits by time or number of opens, scheduled downtime with named routines, and a “balance score” for your phone habits. Paused is a different shape of app, so this is a comparison rather than a pitch — the table starts with what Roots does better.

Roots vs Paused, side by side

	Roots	Paused
Known for	Roots offers one-tap blocking, app limits by time or number of opens, scheduled downtime with named routines, and a “balance score” for your phone habits.	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	Open-count limits. Roots can block an app after a set number of opens, not just a set amount of time, and its balance score turns habits into one number.	Paused skips scores and allowances: a schedule that switches apps off, a Focus session for now, and a streak.
Day to day it feels like	You pick apps and rules — times, sessions, sometimes a daily allowance — and the app shields them. The differences are in how strict the rules can be made and how hard they are to undo.	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 Roots if…

…you want a limit expressed as “five opens a day” or a score to watch. Paused has neither.

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.