Frequently asked questions

Finish a habit that has a check on it. Unglue pays Coins for habits it can verify: a photo scan, a step count read from Apple Health, or a finished focus session.

Habits without a check can still be worth Coins if you set a reward when you create them. How much you are allowed to assign depends on your difficulty tier, which is covered in what the difficulty tiers change.

Coins are a daily balance. What you earn today is spent today, and tomorrow starts at zero.

So a balance of zero first thing in the morning is normal, and nothing has been lost. The reason is deliberate: banking a big pile of Coins on Sunday would buy you a very long Wednesday evening of scrolling, which is the thing you installed Unglue to stop. We would spend that pile too, for what it is worth.

Tap the lock button in the bottom bar of Unglue and pick a length. One Coin buys one minute, and the presets are 1, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 30 minutes. Anything you cannot afford yet is greyed out.

Your restricted apps open straight away and re-lock on their own when the time runs out.

One catch: while a focus session is running you cannot buy screen time until the session finishes.

You can end it early. While an unlock is running, the bottom bar shows the time remaining with a stop button next to it. Tap that and your apps lock again immediately.

Coins you already spent do not come back, so ending early costs you the rest of the minutes you bought. There is no way to extend an unlock that is already running. Let it finish, or stop it, then buy again.

Yes. Add the Unglue widget to your Home Screen. It shows your current Coin balance, what you have earned today, and a countdown when an unlock is running.

If you have not set it up yet, Settings has a card that walks you through adding it.

The scan runs on your device and looks for the thing the habit describes. Most rejections come down to framing. Get the subject in the middle of the frame, fill more of the shot with it, and give it decent light. A dark or partly covered lens gets rejected on its own.

When the scan is unsure rather than certain, Easy and Medium show a Mark Done button so you can claim the habit anyway. On Hard that button is gone by design and retrying is the only path.

If a photo that clearly shows the right thing keeps failing, send it to us through the support form with your Account ID.

Two things. The first is how many Coins you can assign to a habit that has no verification on it: Easy allows up to 30, Medium up to 15, and Hard removes the reward picker, so unverified habits pay nothing.

The second is the photo scan. Easy and Medium let you mark a habit done when the scan is unsure. Hard does not.

Everyone starts on Medium. You can change it in Settings > Blocking > Difficulty.

Downgrades wait 24 hours before they take effect. Moving up a tier applies instantly.

The delay exists so that a hard evening cannot talk you into an easier week. You can cancel a pending downgrade at any point during those 24 hours, and the screen shows the countdown while it is waiting.

Force-quit Unglue and open it again. The app re-reads the day from your account on launch, which clears most cases where a habit is stuck part-way through or the list came back empty after a restart.

If the habits are still wrong after a relaunch, that is worth reporting. Grab your Account ID from Settings > Profile and send it with a short description through the support form.

Sometimes the problem is on our side. Unglue runs on a small set of cloud services, and when one of them has an outage, habits can stop updating or the app can fail to load your day. The status page shows the live health of those services. If something is flagged there, the fix is already on the way and there is nothing you need to do.

If everything is green, a force-quit and relaunch clears most sync issues, as described in a habit will not finish.

Yes. Step habits read your step count from Apple Health, so Unglue needs read access to that one data type. Without it your steps come back as zero and the habit never completes.

You can grant it from Settings > Apple Health in Unglue. If you turned it down earlier, iOS will not ask twice, so re-enable it in the iPhone Settings app under Health > Data Access & Devices > Unglue.

Go to Settings > Blocking > Restricted Apps, then edit your selection. You can pick individual apps or whole categories, and Unglue selects the matching Safari site alongside an app so the browser is not an open back door.

There are screenshots of the full walkthrough on the support page.

If you have Selection Lock on, adding apps stays free but removing them needs a Buddy Code.

Selection Lock closes the loophole where you can unrestrict an app the moment you want it. Turn it on and Unglue gives you a Buddy Code once, on screen. Hand it to someone you trust, because removing apps from your Restricted list then needs that code.

The code is never stored on your phone, and it changes every time it is used to approve a removal, so the new one has to be handed over again.

It lives in Settings > Blocking > Selection Lock. Adding apps is never gated. Only taking them away.

Open Settings > Blocking > Selection Lock and choose the option for not having your code. That starts a 24-hour turn-off, and the lock releases on its own when the wait is up.

You can cancel the wait at any time. There is no other way around it, and we cannot look the code up for you, since it was never stored anywhere we can read.

Almost always this is the Screen Time permission. Unglue blocks apps through Apple's Family Controls, and that access can drop after an iOS update, a restore from backup, or a change to Screen Time settings.

1. Open Unglue and let it sit on the home screen for a moment. It re-applies the shield on launch and repairs most drift on its own.
2. Go to Settings > Blocking > Restricted Apps. If permission was revoked, Unglue asks for it again here.
3. Check that your Restricted list is not empty. Nothing is blocked when nothing is selected.

If apps still open freely after that, send us your Account ID through the support form.

Trim your Restricted list down to the essentials before you go, or clear it entirely, then rebuild it when you are home. Maps, messaging and banking apps are usually worth leaving out of the list permanently.

Worth knowing before you leave: with Selection Lock on, taking apps off the list needs the Buddy Code, and the fallback is a 24-hour wait. Sort that out the day before the flight rather than at the gate.

Opening Unglue once on a given calendar day. That is the whole rule. Your streak counts days you showed up, so it does not depend on finishing every habit.

Miss a full day and the count goes back to one.

No. Once a streak breaks there is no repair, no freeze token, and no way for us to restore it.

Pause Mode is the tool for this, and it only works ahead of time. If you know a stretch of days is going to be impossible, turn it on before they arrive.

Pause Mode freezes your streak count for between 1 and 14 days. The number sits still while you are away and picks up where it left off on the day you come back.

Your apps stay blocked throughout, and Coins work exactly as usual. Pause Mode protects the streak, and nothing else.

It is in Settings > Pause Mode. You can end a pause early, and you can ask for a reminder on the day it ends.

Yes, as long as you sign in with the same account you used before. Install Unglue on the new phone and log in, and your habits, streak and history come down from your account.

Your Restricted Apps selection does not transfer, because iOS keeps that on the device. Pick your apps again in Settings > Blocking > Restricted Apps once you are signed in.

They are analysed on your iPhone. The check runs locally, decides whether the habit passes, and the photo is not kept afterwards or added to any library of ours.

The same goes for the apps you block. Unglue asks iOS to shield them, and iOS never tells us which apps you chose or how long you spent in them. Details are in our privacy policy.

Go to Settings > Profile > Delete Account and confirm. That removes your data from our servers and wipes everything Unglue kept on the phone, including your habits, streak and Coin history.

It cannot be undone, and deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel that separately first, as described in how to cancel or manage your subscription.

If you cannot get into the app, there is a deletion request form.

Subscriptions bought on an iPhone are managed by Apple, so the switch is in iOS rather than in Unglue. Open the iPhone Settings app, tap your name at the top, then Subscriptions, then Unglue.

Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep everything until the date you have already paid through. Apple handles refunds, not us, through reportaproblem.apple.com.

If you are being asked to pick a plan despite having paid, that one is answered on the support page.

Each type has its own switch in Settings > Notifications inside Unglue: habit reminders, alerts for when purchased screen time runs out, encouragement check-ins, the evening streak reminder, and the morning kickoff. Turn off the ones you do not want and leave the rest.

Habit reminders are set per habit, so the time and days come from the habit itself. Edit the habit to move it.

Yes. Our UGC program is for people who use Unglue and want to film short videos about it. You record yourself using the app in your own style, and we work with you from there.

Read the details and apply on the become an ambassador page. In the app, the same link lives under Settings > Communities.