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How to block The Guardian on iPhone

Two ways, both on the phone in your hand. Option A is free and already built into iOS. Option B is Paused, if you'd rather it happen automatically and be harder to tap past.

Free · built into iOS

Option A — Apple Screen Time

No download, no subscription. Apple's own App Limits can block The Guardian specifically, and Downtime can switch it off by time of day.

  1. Turn Screen Time on. Open Settings → Screen Time. First time? Tap Turn On Screen Time, choose "This is My iPhone", and set a Screen Time passcode — pick four digits you won't type on reflex at 11pm.
  2. Add an App Limit. Still in Screen Time, tap App Limits → Add Limit.
  3. Select The Guardian. Apple sorts your apps into broad buckets and The Guardian sits with the Information & Reading apps. Tap the arrow beside Information & Reading to expand it and tick The Guardian only — or just type "The Guardian" into the search field at the top, which is faster. Tap Next.
  4. Set the allowance. Choose how long The Guardian gets each day. 30 minutes is a soft cap; 1 minute is effectively off. Tap Customize Days if weekends should be different, then tap Add.
  5. Turn on Block at End of Limit. Reopen the limit you just made and switch on Block at End of Limit. Without it, the "Ignore Limit" button hands the whole evening straight back to The Guardian.
  6. Add Downtime for a time-of-day block. A daily budget isn't the same as "off after 10pm". For that, go back to Screen Time → Downtime → Scheduled and set the window (10pm–7am is the classic), then check that The Guardian is not listed under Always Allowed. During Downtime it's blocked outright — there's no allowance left to burn.

The honest catch: it works, but it's four screens deep in Settings, the limit resets its own way, and if you know the passcode you can undo it in about six seconds. That's why so many people set an App Limit once and never think about it again.

Automatic · one tap

Option B — block The Guardian with Paused

Same Apple blocking engine underneath, built for the one job: getting The Guardian out of your evening without you having to decide again every night.

  1. Create a Block Schedule. Open Paused and create a Block Schedule — that's the recurring, automatic kind.
  2. Pick The Guardian. Choose The Guardian from your installed apps. While you're in there, add the rest of your news time-sinks too — NewsBreak, Medium, Substack — because The Guardian is almost never the only one.
  3. Choose the window. Set the days and hours: 10pm–7am so the night is yours, 9–5 for work, or 7–9pm so dinner and the evening stay phone-free.
  4. Save it and forget it. That's the whole setup. From then on The Guardian turns itself off when the window starts and comes back on when it ends — no willpower, no remembering.
  5. Use a Focus session when you need The Guardian gone right now. One tap starts a Focus session: pick a length — 25 minutes, two hours, until dinner is over — and The Guardian stays locked until the timer runs out.
  6. Let the streak do the rest. Every day you keep the block stacks your streak. That's the part that keeps this working in week three, once the novelty of a fresh limit has worn off.

What it can see: nothing. Paused blocks through Apple's Screen Time (Family Controls) framework, so it can stop The Guardian from opening without reading your messages, your browsing, or anything you do inside the app. Your usage stays on your device.

Why The Guardian is hard to put down

Live blogs and the opinion section make doomscrolling feel like being well informed.

Which is the point worth sitting with: you're not weak, you're up against a team of people whose job is the next tap. That's also why "I'll just be more disciplined" keeps failing and a dumb, boring wall — The Guardian simply doesn't open between 10pm and 7am — keeps working. Put the decision somewhere your 11pm self can't reach it.

And block the neighbours while you're there. Closing The Guardian and landing on the next news app in the same second is the most common way this falls apart — so block the cluster (NewsBreak, Medium, Substack), not the single worst offender.

Get Paused — free on the App Store Get →