We're Oliver and Royce and we're the founders of Clearspace. We build tools to help people reduce their screen time (here’s us two years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35888644)
We get all kinds of requests from users for ways they'd like to use their screen time data.
- “Auto-donate $x to charity every time I exceed a limit or try to bypass it”
- “My 75 Hard group has a screen time requirement, can we set up group visibility?”
- “Let my personal agent know if it’s a good time to tackle things on my todo list”
- “Auto-report large deviations in my screen time to my therapist “
We aren't able to build for all of them, so we're releasing this API.
This is the first time iOS Screen Time is accessible on the web. Apple doesn’t expose it, but since we measure it ourselves, we can - via UI or API. We're launching this API so developers can build all these tools and more. Our goal is to enable more solutions to what we believe is the biggest problem in the world - the misalignment of human attention and intention in the digital world.
Here's a quick demo of setting up and using the API: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QahETj3xaaIsn0JiNbuqvTaSLdx...
by alexdanilowicz on 6/5/25, 6:47 PM
As someone who currently "bricks" his phone and has gamified it a bit by sharing my stats with my brother-in-law who also does that, this is cool. I do think "not spending time on your phone" needs to be celebrated more.
P.S. "bricks" meaning a very strict screentime set up, only basically phone + text is available M-F
by navs on 6/5/25, 8:06 PM
This is amazing. I've been measuring my mental wellbeing through different data points. Currently manually importing my apple health data into a Jupyter notebook and measuring against my journal sentiment, finances and whatever I can gain access to. This would be another interesting data point.
by codethief on 6/5/25, 8:34 PM
Unrelated to the REST API, I just installed your Clearspace app on my Android phone (Pixel 8 W/ GrapheneOS). I can't use the app without connecting it to my Google account and the app requires network permissions? (There are so many others on the Play Store that will sell your app usage data.) Sorry, but no.
by handfuloflight on 6/5/25, 7:20 PM
Could you just clarify how the data from someone's device gets to this API? Do they have to install something?
by ErikBjare on 6/6/25, 9:58 AM
I've been building ActivityWatch as an open source local-first cross-platform time-tracker that does this too (also with an API).
We even built an app "Thankful" which let's users donate to creators they frequent way back in 2018. Never went anywhere, but I still kinda believe in the idea.
Nice to see you got iOS screen time working! We've tried over the years, but Apple always made it hard. I'll have a look how you approached it.
by drag0s on 6/5/25, 7:45 PM
I love this! I think it would be even better to have a React Native SDK available and the ability to lock/unlock screen time via the API.
by roycebranning on 6/5/25, 6:54 PM
someone lmk me when they've built the "venmo my friend when I go over 7 hrs in a day" service...i'll sign up immediately
by aziaziazi on 6/5/25, 7:45 PM
Hi, thanks for that interesting tool. Totally unrelated question: I love the UI, did you use a public css framework/theme?
by TrueGeek on 6/6/25, 7:59 AM
This is awesome, but it'd be great if you allowed for apps that we wanted to use more, not less.
I installed it and added my language learning app hoping to be able to use the API to report if I've studied enough. Unfortunately, it assumed I was trying to use this app less and immediately locked it.
by beggi on 6/5/25, 7:24 PM
Very cool! Are there plans to make it possible to restrict apps via rest API as well?
by ctippett on 6/6/25, 6:12 PM
How (well) does this work cross-device? If I have the Clearspace app on both an iPhone and iPad, does the API aggregate the time as if they were one entity or is it possible to separate the two?
by mikaoj85 on 6/5/25, 6:59 PM
The webpage is not very usable on my iOS screen, is that on purpose?
by awaseem on 6/5/25, 9:22 PM
Wait is this just a proxy through to the clearspace app? Cool concept, might add this to Foqos (open source restrictions app). Is your API open source?
by kovek on 6/5/25, 9:38 PM
This is great! I am really interested in trying this out. Also, I am wondering, are there solutions similar to this but on MacOS?
by jdamon96 on 6/5/25, 6:55 PM
This looks great, excited to try it out
by mspool on 6/6/25, 2:57 PM
Very cool! Are you able to get a breakdown by application?
by abletonlive on 6/5/25, 8:18 PM
This is a really cool concept but I unfortunately care too much about privacy to use you as the handler of all of my screen time data. I know that’s partially why y’all mention that it’s not for everybody but I would like to just say it is cool nonetheless!
by noleary on 6/5/25, 6:27 PM
Can you extend access to everyone with the link?
by batesy on 6/5/25, 7:33 PM
So cool. How does it work?
by preshdkumar on 6/5/25, 7:01 PM
love this idea a lot
by trial3 on 6/5/25, 11:14 PM
i could not want this more, but ownership over this data is non-negotiable. i would pay a small yearly fee to support the tools that give me the ability to selfhost this.