Last updated March 25, 2026
We are great fans of Apple, and we are truly grateful that the Apple engineering team built and made available Screen Time API. This API powers the Opal app and many other great apps, all with the ultimate goal of helping billions of people focus better. In the spirit of collaboration to make the API better for everyone to use, and to make Opal better for our community, we have compiled a list of issues we have encountered and already reported to Apple.
Alec, Peter, Julien, Thibaud, Ugo, Anton, Konrad, Matt and Kenneth from Opal.
Opal is the largest app utilizing the Screen Time API, consistently ranking among the top 30 grossing productivity apps in the U.S. since its release in 2022, with over 10,000,000 installs and averaging 1M Daily Active Users. However, we are facing significant challenges with the API that have been reported to Apple. These include system freezing, slow data loading, frequent crashes, and interruptions to audio playback and notifications, all of which disrupt the user experience. Additionally, blocked websites during sessions can unintentionally block unrelated apps, and blocked apps do not return to their original positions on the springboard after unblocking. These issues are critical to address to enhance the reliability and usability of the Screen Time API for Opal and other developers. They are ordered by priority.
Status: Ongoing ⚠️
Radar: No radar created as no logs from consistently replicated steps.
Forum link: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/809410
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/812472
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/814559
Issue Description:
Apps are being blocked at random times, even when the user has not reached the set time limit. After updating to iOS 26.2, we noticed a huge issue: the events started to fire (reach the threshold) in the DeviceActivityMonitorExtension prematurely, almost immediately after scheduling. This issue is affecting c. 250,000 unique users daily.
⚠️ Use a device running any iOS version except iOS 26**. One critical issues, both reproducible on iOS 18 and 26, suggesting they were introduced when compiling with the iOS 26 SDK:**
Steps to Reproduce: