What is PhonePact?

PhonePact is an iOS app that helps you reduce your own screen time. You choose a daily amount of phone time — your pact point — and a small circle of people you trust receives one plain check-in when you reach it. It never blocks an app, never locks your phone, and never tells anyone what you were doing.

It is made by PhonePact LLC, an independent company founded in 2026 by Hank Yang. It is not a parental-control app, and there is no version of it that lets one person monitor another.

Everything below is the same information in more detail. If you'd rather read the argument than the spec, that lives in our ethos.

1. You set a pact point. A number of hours and minutes of total screen time on your iPhone — the point at which you'd like to notice you've been on your phone. It is a threshold, not a limit: nothing happens to your phone when you cross it. Any later change to it needs one circle partner's approval and a stated duration, so raising it is a conversation instead of a quiet slip.

2. Time counts upward, and a private notice reaches you first. PhonePact reads whole-device screen time — the same daily total you'd see in Settings — and only ever states time already spent, never time remaining. A countdown invites you to spend what's left. Ten usage-minutes before your pact point, you get a private notice that nobody else sees. You can set how often those notices arrive, or turn them off.

3. Your circle gets one plain sentence. When you reach your pact point, every circle you belong to receives something like "Hank reached 2 hours of screen time today." That is the entire message. It repeats every additional thirty minutes, up to six more times in a day, and there is no final state, no streak and no score. Each circle has a plain-text room for encouragement where messages disappear after 24 hours, so nothing accumulates into a record of your worst week.

It will not block, lock, or restrict any app. There is no limit to hit, no wall to argue with, and no override code — because there is nothing to override. This is deliberate: a lock you control is a door you locked while keeping the key in your own pocket.

It will not show your circle what you used the phone for. Not the apps, not the sites, not the messages, not your location. Your circle receives a duration and nothing else. Which apps you enrolled during setup never leaves your iPhone.

It will not let one person monitor another. Everyone in a circle is a peer running the app on their own device, and everyone sees the same single fact about everyone else. There is no dashboard, no admin, no parent side.

It will not rank, score, or streak you. No leaderboards, no comparisons, no penalty for a bad day. The research on social comparison is the reason.

It will not sell your data or show you ads. Ever. That's what the subscription is for.

Platform: iPhone only. PhonePact reads screen time through Apple's Screen Time framework, which exists on iOS and nowhere else. There is no Android app and no web version.

Price: Free to download. Your 30-day free trial starts when your first pact is actually live — Screen Time connected, at least one circle — not the day you install. No credit card is required to begin, so there is nothing to cancel. After 30 days, one account is $0.99 a month or $9.99 for the year, which keeps your circles, rooms, approvals and shared check-ins active.

Age: The launch version is for people 13 and older. On a family-managed device, Apple may require a parent or guardian to authorize Screen Time access.

Status: PhonePact is in development and not on the App Store yet. There's a waitlist, and the 30 free days apply from launch.

Made by: PhonePact LLC, an independent company. Support is support@getphonepact.com. If you found this page while looking for a similarly named app, this comparison sorts out which is which.