Handover blocks apps three different ways, and the difference between them is what the block is attached to: a place, a session, or a window of the week. This page shows each one as it is built in the app, what it does once armed, and what to put in the gap it leaves.
Blocks in Handover are enforced through Apple's Screen Time framework, not by anything running in the foreground. That matters for one reason: the rule holds with Handover closed, after a restart, and while the phone is offline. A blocker that only works while its own app is awake is a reminder, not a block.
Every rule also keeps a way back in, on purpose. Anything that locks a person out of their own phone gets deleted inside a week, so the exit stays open and is priced instead. Break Glass opens one rule after a five minute wait and costs five minutes off your streak. The Emergency Coupon opens everything for an hour and costs twelve days. Calls, messages, maps and the camera are never restricted.
Setting up any rule follows the same four steps. Name it, put apps in it, choose what the block is attached to, then press HANDOVER to arm it.
How to set it up. Create a rule and pick the place type, marked by the pin in the top right corner. Rename it with the pencil, here it is called GeoIP Blocker. Add the apps you want shut: tap the dashed plus to choose from everything installed, or tap the small plus on any icon in the distractions row underneath. Then find the location, either by typing an address into the search field or by moving the map, and set how far the rule reaches with the radius slider, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 metres. Press HANDOVER.
What it does. While the phone is inside that circle, those apps do not open. Step outside it and they work normally. Nothing is scheduled and nothing counts down, the rule simply follows the ground you are standing on.
What it is for. Places where you already know how the evening goes. The office desk, the lecture theatre, the gym, your own kitchen. A place rule is the least negotiable kind because it needs no decision from you at all: arriving is the trigger.
How to set it up. Pick the session type, the clock icon. Add the apps, here the social set. Set how long one sitting lasts with the first slider, from 5 to 30 minutes, and how many sittings the day gets with the second, from 1 to 5. The example allows 15 minutes, twice a day. Then set the hours the rule is awake, 08:00 to 20:00, and tap the days it runs. Press HANDOVER.
What it does. Inside the active hours the apps are shut until you start a session. When the session ends they close again, and once the day's sessions are used up they stay closed until tomorrow. The allowance does not roll over.
What it is for. Apps you genuinely use and do not want to lose, which is most of them. A session rule keeps the app and removes the drift, because the cost lands at the point where you would otherwise open it for the ninth time.
How to set it up. Pick the strict type, the shield. Add the apps, here just Facebook and Instagram. Set the start and end time, and tap the days you want it on. The example runs 00:00 to 00:00, which is the whole day, on Saturday and Sunday only. Press HANDOVER.
What it does. Those apps are gone for that window on those days, with no session to start and no allowance to spend. The shield marks the rule as strict, so the ordinary exit is not available and the Emergency Coupon is what remains, at the price of twelve streak days.
What it is for. A boundary you have already decided on and do not want to re-decide every week. Weekends, evenings after a set hour, the first hour after waking. Keep it narrow. A rule that covers everything gets broken once and then abandoned, while a rule that covers one clearly defined stretch survives.
A block creates an empty minute, and an empty minute is what the reach was answering in the first place. The four habits below are the ones that hold up, and each works because it occupies the same slot the phone was occupying rather than asking you to want it less.
The reach is physical before it is anything else, so the cheapest counter is a task that needs both hands. Cooking, an instrument, repairs, a pen. Do it in the same window your rule covers and the block stops feeling like a subtraction. Put the phone in another room while you do it: measured cognitive capacity is higher with the phone out of sight than with it face down beside you.
Shared meals are the highest value hour to protect and the easiest to lose, because one phone on the table gives everyone else permission. Agree that both phones go away, or set a place rule on the kitchen and let the software hold the line instead of one person having to police it. Conversation is the substitute here, and it is a better one than anything a feed offers.
If the apps have to open, make the opening cost something physical. Handover can hold a rule behind repetitions counted by the phone's own sensors, or a step goal that cannot be completed sitting down. The point is not fitness. It is that a reflex which now requires forty squats stops being a reflex, because it has become a decision with a price attached.
Whatever is nearest wins. A book on the arm of the chair, a paperback in the same pocket the phone lives in, a charger in the hallway rather than beside the bed. This is the smallest change on the list and the one most likely to still be in place a month later, because it asks for nothing at the moment of temptation. It just changes what your hand finds.
None of these require you to be strong-willed at 11pm. That is the whole test. If a plan only works on the days you feel like it, it is not a plan, it is a mood.
Handover is free for five rules, with no card required. Blocks are enforced by Apple's Screen Time framework, and no screen time data leaves the device.