Block a category, not a list of apps

Block six apps by name and you have blocked six apps. The seventh, the one you install in three weeks because the first six were blocked, is not on the list.

This is not hypothetical and it is not a failure of discipline. It is what a list does. Anything defined by enumeration has an outside, and you will find the outside without going looking for it.

Choosing Social or Games selects the classification, not the members. Apps that join the category later are covered on the day they arrive.

It is the closest thing available to a rule rather than a list, and it is the single highest leverage choice in the whole setup.

• Covers apps you have not installed yet.
• Survives an app being renamed or replaced.
• One choice instead of a list to maintain.

When your work lives inside it. Blocking all of Social when one of those apps is how clients reach you is a rule with a hole in it that you will widen until it is not a rule.

In that case pick individually, and be honest about which app is the actual problem. Usually it is one or two, and naming them is more effective than a category you have to keep making exceptions to.

Whichever you choose, the app doing the blocking never learns what you picked. iOS hands it sealed tokens it cannot read and draws the names and icons itself.

That is enforced by the system rather than promised in a policy, and it is why a well built blocker shows you a count instead of a list. It genuinely does not know.

One category for the bulk of it, plus one or two individual apps that fall outside. Websites selected separately, because the browser is the obvious way round anything else.

Then leave it alone for a fortnight. Tuning the selection is the most satisfying and least useful part of this, and every hour spent on it is an hour of not finding out whether the arrangement holds.