Help Centre

No. Grounded has no account system, no sign-up, and no password. Your identity is a random ID stored locally on your iPhone. Nothing syncs, nothing is tied to your email.

• Screen Time (Family Controls) — required. This is what lets Grounded shield the apps you choose. Apple reviewed and approved Grounded for this entitlement.
• Health (read steps, write mindful minutes) — required. Steps are the core earning loop, and Grounded's setup won't complete without Health access.
• Location (Always) — optional. Only used to detect when you arrive at a park for a check-in. Denying it just disables that feature.
• Notifications — optional. Reminders for daily goals and end-of-window alerts.

None of these are transmitted off your device.

1. Open Grounded, go to Settings › Blocked Apps.
2. Tap Choose Apps. Apple's system-level picker appears — search for or select the apps you want to block.
3. Confirm. Your selections are now shielded until you earn and spend credits.

Free tier can block up to 3 apps. Premium is unlimited.

1 credit = 1 minute of unlock time. You earn credits three ways:

• Walking: 10 credits per 1,000 steps (read from Apple Health).
• Focus sessions: 1 credit per 2 minutes across all session types. Premium boosts Mindfulness to 1 credit per 90 seconds. Preset durations: Deep Focus 25/45/60/90 min; Mindfulness 5/10/15/20 min; Movement 10/15/30/45 min (Premium unlocks the longer durations). Free tier is capped at 3 completed focus sessions per day; Premium is unlimited. Sessions shorter than 5 minutes earn zero credits — the floor is there to stop a flood of 30-second "sessions" from gaming the score.
• Nature check-ins: 15 to 30 credits per verified visit to a park, trail, or outdoor spot. Two limits to prevent geofence farming: you can only check in at each unique spot once per day, and there's a 30-minute global cooldown between any two nature check-ins — so a "big nature day" needs 6 different locations with real travel time between them.

When you unlock, you pick a window length: 15 or 30 minutes on the free plan, with 60-minute windows available on Premium. The blocked apps open for that full window. Lock early and any unused credits come back (the only exception is Strict Mode — a Premium toggle that commits the window to its full length, no early lock). Free tier also has two daily limits: 60 total unlock minutes/day and 2 windows/day. Premium removes both.

Grounded reads steps from Apple Health. If steps aren't showing up:

1. Open iOS Settings › Health › Data Access & Devices › Grounded — confirm "Read" is enabled for Steps.
2. Your steps need to actually be in Apple Health. Open the Health app and check the Steps card — if it's empty, the iPhone or your watch isn't logging them.
3. Grounded batches HealthKit reads — it can take up to a minute for your daily total to refresh. Pull-to-refresh on the Home tab forces a re-read.

Grounded uses Apple Maps to find real parks, trails, beaches, and outdoor spots near your current location. When you physically arrive at one of those spots (we use Core Location geofencing), the Nature tab offers a check-in button. A verified check-in adds 15-30 credits to your balance.

With Premium, you can add your own custom spots — a local park that Apple Maps doesn't know about, for example — and extend the search radius from 5 km up to 20 km.

Yes — and there are two kinds: how many credits you can earn in a day, and how many you can spend.

Earning caps:

• Steps: up to 60 credits/day on free (~6,000 steps), 120 on Premium (12,000 steps).
• Focus: up to 240 credits/day across all session types. Free is also capped at 3 completed sessions/day; Premium is unlimited and unlocks the longer durations (60 + 90 min Deep Focus, 15 + 20 min Mindfulness, 30 + 45 min Movement).
• Nature check-ins: up to 30 credits/day on free (~2 visits), 90 on Premium (3-6 visits depending on the spot). Parks and gardens give 15 credits; trails, beaches, and lakes give 20; forests, lookouts, and nature reserves give 25; mountains give 30.

Spending caps (free tier only):

• 60 unlock minutes/day total, across however many windows you open.
• 2 unlock windows/day max — locking early refunds the unused credits but the window still counts toward your 2.

Premium removes both spending caps. Most days you won't get close to the earning ceiling — and note that credits don't bank across days: each day's earnings reset at midnight, so the spending caps keep free unlock time to a steady daily rhythm instead of a single binge.

A streak day requires at least one meaningful activity — 3,000+ steps, a focus session of 15+ minutes, or a nature check-in. Miss a qualifying day and the streak resets to zero on the free plan.

Premium adds Streak Freeze. One rest day per rolling 7 days is forgiven automatically — missed Tuesday stays forgiven until the following Tuesday. Miss two days in a week and the streak still breaks. No aggressive notifications either way: Grounded won't panic-ping you to come back.

Strict Mode is a Premium feature for the "just five more minutes" trap. Turn it on in Settings › Commitment and the End-early button on focus sessions + the Lock-now button on active unlock windows are disabled. The session or window runs its full length — that's the whole point.

You can switch Strict Mode off at any time when you don't have an active session or window. Turning it off mid-session isn't possible — otherwise it wouldn't be strict.

Premium unlocks the same earning loop, just with the ceilings lifted:

• Unlimited blocked apps + whole-category blocking (Social, Games, Entertainment) — free picks up to 3 individual apps; categories like "Social" are Premium because one tap shields dozens of apps at once.
• 60-minute unlock windows (free = 15 or 30).
• Unlimited daily unlock minutes (free = 60 min/day total).
• Unlimited unlock windows per day (free = 2/day).
• Unlimited focus sessions per day (free = 3/day).
• Faster Mindfulness earning — 1 credit per 90 sec (free = 1 credit per 2 min, same as Deep Focus).
• Higher daily step credits — up to 120/day (free = 60).
• Higher daily nature credits — up to 90/day (free = 30).
• Longer focus sessions — 60 + 90 min Deep Focus, 15 + 20 min Mindfulness, 30 + 45 min Movement (free gets the shorter, most popular lengths).
• Full Progress history — Week, Month, and Year time ranges plus full credit-history charts (free = Week range and today's credit summary only).
• All 6 nature themes for focus sessions (free = 2: Beach and Forest).
• Custom nature spots — drop your own pin anywhere on the map.
• Extended search radius up to 20 km (free = 5 km).
• Streak Freeze — one rest day per rolling 7 days keeps a missed day from resetting your streak to zero.
• Strict Mode — once an unlock window or focus session starts, you can't end it early. Helpful for beating the "just five more minutes" loop.

In the App: Settings › Subscription or tap any locked feature. You'll see two plans:

• Yearly — US$39.99 after a 7-day free trial. Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing.
• Monthly — US$1.99 for your first month, then US$4.99/month. Cancel anytime.

Purchases are handled by Apple via StoreKit 2 — we never see your payment details. Prices shown are USD; Apple converts to your local currency at checkout.

All Apple subscriptions are managed in one place:

1. Open the iPhone Settings app.
2. Tap your name at the top.
3. Tap Subscriptions.
4. Tap Grounded Premium and then Cancel Subscription.

Your current billing period stays active until it expires. You won't be charged again.

Tap Restore Purchases at the bottom of the paywall, or in Settings › Subscription. StoreKit sometimes takes a few seconds to propagate the entitlement to the App.

Refunds for App Store purchases go through Apple at reportaproblem.apple.com. Apple reviews each refund request. We can't issue refunds directly because we never touch your payment.

The Monthly plan supports Family Sharing — up to 6 family members can share the subscription via your iCloud Family group. The Yearly plan is single-user for launch; Family Sharing for Yearly may be added in a future update.

Apple's DeviceActivity framework has known reliability limitations (Apple Feedback FB18061981). Grounded has five fallbacks, but sometimes a reboot fixes things:

1. Open iOS Settings › Screen Time › See all activity. Confirm Screen Time is enabled for your device.
2. Open iOS Settings › Screen Time › App Limits and make sure Grounded has authorisation.
3. In Grounded, go to Settings › Blocked Apps › Choose Apps and re-select the apps (sometimes the Apple tokens go stale).
4. Restart your iPhone.
5. If still broken, email me with your iOS version and a short description of what's happening.

This is rare but can happen if iOS kills the DeviceActivity extension between when you started and when the window ends. Grounded should re-apply shields within a minute of the next app foreground. If it persists, tap the Home tab's lock icon to force re-shield immediately, or open Blocked Apps and tap "Lock Now".

In the App: Settings › Privacy Settings › Delete Account & Data. This wipes SwiftData (sessions, streaks, credits), App Group storage (selections, state), the Keychain UUID, and UserDefaults (display name, goals, settings). Two caveats: (1) Mindful Session entries Grounded wrote to Apple Health stay in your Health database — open Apple Health › Browse › Mindfulness › Show All Data and delete Grounded's entries there if you want them removed. (2) Subscription receipts remain with Apple; restore them anytime via Restore Purchases.

Uninstalling Grounded from the home screen removes most local data, but iOS Keychain items can persist across reinstall — use the in-app delete above for a guaranteed wipe. Uninstalling also won't auto-cancel an active subscription — cancel via iPhone Settings › Subscriptions first.

No. Grounded doesn't run in the background except when you're inside a focus session or actively in a geofence for a nature check-in. Location updates are batched and Apple's energy-efficient region monitoring is used. Step reads happen via HealthKit observers — Apple delivers updates when the data changes, not on a constant poll.

Grounded is iPhone-only for the initial release. Family Controls behaves differently between iPad and iPhone, and shipping iPhone-first keeps the blocking experience consistent. If enough people email asking for iPad, I'll build it — the codebase is portable.