Basically I want to create an app where you can select any of your installed apps and then restrict/unrestrict them. I have a great idea for an app, but need the user to be able to restrict an installed app with my own app for it to work.
I tried working with screen time restrictions but couldn’t get it to work somehow. Im doing this on IOS 17 Xcode. Also im pretty new to programming so I dont know a lot of stuff. I especially lack a lot of knowledge in screen time of iOS 17.
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- I’m afraid Apple does not provide API to get any installed apps (by security reasons)
- For implementing the application restrict/unrestrict you need to build your own VPN. I can suggest checkout UI/UX for an application like “Freedoom” – they just predict what app to allow and what app to restrict (using their own VPN)
- Apple gets this statistic about usage by using their private API, but they can share this data with you. I can suggest to check out this WWDC video What’s new in Screen Time API
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Apple does provide a mechanism where a limited number of apps can exclusively share information amongst themselves: “App Groups”.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/bundleresources/entitlements/com_apple_security_application-groups
Using this, they can pass information to each other via UserDefaults
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundation/userdefaults/1409957-init
or shared files via “shared containers”.
With this, it seems like you could make these related apps set and read some limitations via config file.
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