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
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.
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.
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?
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.
The alternative is forcing users to create yet another account/password during signup. This always infuriates me as a user - especially in the days before iOS 18 when there was no password manager support on iOS.
It doesn't really feel like "forcing users into adtech surveillance platforms" if they're using Android - they already have a Google account it's literally built into the operating system.
The goal was and is to minimize friction and maximize security. For all the flaws of consumer subscription as a business model, it's beauty is that we don't have perverse incentives. Users pay us to protect their attention so we make money by being good at that. We don't have to or want to sell their data.
Would recommend creating an account in the API docs first because that way when you log into Clearspace you'll get an onboarding for API setup rather than general setup of the app
Maybe other apps in future will report data to the API as well
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.
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?
For retrieving Mac OS screen time programatically? Not that I'm aware of.
In any Apple device, In settings -> Screen Time there's an option for "share across devices". If that is turned on, all devices will report your cumulative totals. So if you're interested in retrieving your screen time from all your devices, you can turn that on and then your iPhone will report everything, which you could retrieve with this API. But you wouldn't be able to differentiate where the screen time came from.
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!
As in allow everyone with a link to programatically retrieve your screen time data? You can't limit by link at the moment but you can go public and allow anyone to programatically access your screen time data.
thescreentimenetwork.com is effectively a list of people doing just that. Does that answer your question?
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.
P.S. "bricks" meaning a very strict screentime set up, only basically phone + text is available M-F
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.
We don't sell your usage data.
Regarding auth, would a free tier or trial version or a one-time payment (each without auth) possibly make sense?
I can see both sides. I want them to not require it but as a developer used to creating lean projects I can understand why they do.
Remember 95%+ of potential users of this app have not spent a minute concerned about Googles data harvesting.
It doesn't really feel like "forcing users into adtech surveillance platforms" if they're using Android - they already have a Google account it's literally built into the operating system.
The goal was and is to minimize friction and maximize security. For all the flaws of consumer subscription as a business model, it's beauty is that we don't have perverse incentives. Users pay us to protect their attention so we make money by being good at that. We don't have to or want to sell their data.
Would recommend creating an account in the API docs first because that way when you log into Clearspace you'll get an onboarding for API setup rather than general setup of the app
Maybe other apps in future will report data to the API as well
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.
https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/run-for-fun-screen-time-focus/...
- lock/unlock apps
- exclude some apps from total screen time calculation
- get data about specific app usage
In any Apple device, In settings -> Screen Time there's an option for "share across devices". If that is turned on, all devices will report your cumulative totals. So if you're interested in retrieving your screen time from all your devices, you can turn that on and then your iPhone will report everything, which you could retrieve with this API. But you wouldn't be able to differentiate where the screen time came from.
thescreentimenetwork.com is effectively a list of people doing just that. Does that answer your question?
it says 'access denied' for me
2. Log in with that account to the Clearspace app which uses on-device permission to report your data to the API
3. Use API key associated with that account to fetch your data or be notified about changes to it
Does that answer?
No
> Does it require using clearspace
Yes in the sense that it needs to downloaded and logged in on your phone. No in the sense that you don't have to open it or use it after setup