See what it costs
Tell PageTime what your phone gets each day. It shows you the same figure in books.
For iPhone · Screen time, spent on books
Reading
over scrolling
PageTime shields the apps that take your evenings, times the chapter you read instead, and shows you the trade in books — not in minutes.
Free to start No account Nothing leaves your phone
First, the arithmetic
You didn’t lose four hours.
You lost four books.
PageTime opens by itemising last week — not to scold you, but because a number you can argue with is the only kind worth showing. Then it converts the total into the only currency this app deals in.
- 10h 2m
- TikTok
- 7h 24m
- X
- 4h 3m
- Everything else
- 2h 26m
- Total
- 23h 55m
- In books
- 4
At 51 pages an hour 1,229 pages
Every input is yours and every one is editable: your pace, your usual book length, how dense your material is. Books are reported fractionally, because a rounded whole number reads as a claim rather than an estimate.
The reveal · onboarding, minute one
How it works
Four steps, then a habit.
The whole app is one loop, and every screen is a step in it. Starting a session takes two taps.
Shield the apps
Pick them in Apple’s own picker. PageTime never sees which apps you chose — only that you chose.
Read for a set time
Fifteen minutes, a chapter, a proper sitting. The shielded apps stay shut until you finish.
Prove the progress
Scan the page you finished on, type it, or just log the time. Your shelf moves either way.
The shield
“You chose Dune instead.”
Reach for Instagram mid-session and it doesn’t open. What you get is one line naming the book you picked over it — the trade you already made, said out loud at the moment you’re about to undo it.
Blocking here is supportive, not punitive. The emergency unlock always works; it just costs about twenty seconds — hold for five, name a reason, wait ten. The session still counts. It only loses its distraction-free mark. Your reasons come back later as your own pattern (“most of your unlocks happen around nine”), never as a telling-off.
Mid-session · apps shielded
The number that matters
Replacement rate, not activity.
Reading minutes go up in every reading app. That can happen while nothing about your evenings actually changes. So PageTime leads with one figure instead: your reading time as a share of the screen time you set out to replace.
One hour fifty-seven read this week, against twenty-four hours on the apps you shielded.
52%
How far through the book you are, and the date you’ll finish at your current pace.
13
Day streak. One recovery day allowed, and any session holds the chain — not a minutes threshold.
Insights · week to date
What’s in it
Not another reading tracker.
The tracking exists to make one trade visible. Everything here serves that, and nothing else got in.
Apple’s own blocking
Built on Screen Time. You pick the apps in Apple’s picker; PageTime shields them for the length of a session and lets them go the moment you finish.
Scan the page you stopped on
Point the camera at the page. On-device text recognition reads the folio, ignores chapter numbers in body text, and offers alternatives when it isn’t sure. It suggests; you decide.
Two taps to begin
How long, then start. Named presets for the morning chapter, the commute, the bedtime read — each showing roughly how many pages that buys you.
Print, ebook and audiobook
Print tracks pages, ebooks per cent, audiobooks minutes. Real cover art, looked up by title and author, with the app’s own cloth-and-type covers as the fallback.
Rain, café, fireplace
A reading room to sit in for the length of the session, or silence. It stops when the session does.
A prompt before the scroll
Set the window your evenings usually disappear into. PageTime speaks up just before it, rather than after the hour is gone.
Commit with someone
Two people, a target, a number of weeks. Each side sees whether the other hit the day — and nothing else about their phone.
A card worth posting
Export your week — hours reclaimed, books finished, the shelf — as an image made to make the person seeing it curious about their own number.
Every assumption is visible
Pace, average book length, material density. All three are in Settings, all three are editable, and every screen showing an estimate says that it is one.
Privacy
No account. Nothing uploaded.
There is no sign-up, because there is no server holding your reading. Your books, sessions and streak live in a single file on your phone, and deleting the app deletes them.
Photos of pages are read by Apple’s on-device Vision framework and discarded in memory — they are never written to disk and never uploaded. Apple’s Screen Time model means PageTime cannot see which apps you shielded, only that you shielded some; the copy never pretends otherwise.
Two things do touch the network, and both are named on the privacy page: a cover-art lookup by title and author, and the App Store’s own subscription handling. That is the whole list.
First launch
Pricing
Read for free. Pay when it’s working.
One session a day, free, forever — enough to find out whether any of this changes your evenings before you spend anything.
Free
£0always
No account, no card
- One reading session a day
- App shielding during sessions
- Your library and reading log
- The reveal, and your own numbers
- Streak and replacement rate
PageTime Full
£29.99per year
7 days free · or £4.99 a month
- Unlimited sessions
- Verified page scans, and the mark
- Reading pacts with a friend
- Nudges before your scrolling window
- Every ambience and theme
Prices shown are for the UK App Store and may differ in your country. Subscriptions are billed by Apple and can be cancelled any time in iOS Settings.
Questions
The honest answers.
Does it actually block apps, or just remind me?
It actually blocks them. PageTime uses Apple’s Screen Time framework, the same machinery as Apple’s own app limits, so a shielded app will not open for the length of your session.
You will be asked to grant Screen Time access once, and to pick your apps in Apple’s picker. Both are Apple’s screens, not ours.
What if I genuinely need a blocked app mid-session?
The emergency unlock always works — there is no version of this app that traps you. It just costs about twenty seconds: hold for five, say why, wait ten. The friction is the point, and the delay is the whole of it.
The session still counts towards your day and your streak. It only loses its distraction-free mark.
Can PageTime see which apps I use?
No, and it is not a policy choice — Apple’s design makes it impossible. The picker hands back opaque tokens that can be shielded but not read. PageTime knows you shielded five things. It does not know what they were.
Where do my reading numbers come from?
From you. Your reading pace starts as your own estimate and moves towards what you have actually been measured doing as sessions accumulate. Average book length and material density are yours to set too, and all three sit in Settings where you can change them.
Anything estimated is labelled estimated, on the screen where it appears.
Do I have to photograph every page?
No. There are three ways to close a session — type the page you finished on, scan it, or log the time and nothing else. Scanning earns a verified mark, so it is rewarded rather than required. Mandatory photography is the fastest way to stop people finishing sessions at all.
Does it work with ebooks and audiobooks?
Yes. Print books track pages, ebooks track per cent, audiobooks track minutes. Page scanning is offered only for print, because it is the only format with a page number a camera can read.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. There is no account and no sync. Your library, sessions and streak live in one file on your phone. Page photos are processed on-device and discarded. The full detail, including the two network calls the app does make, is on the privacy page.
What do I need to run it?
An iPhone running a current version of iOS. PageTime is iPhone-only for now — there is no iPad or Android version.
How do I cancel?
In iOS Settings, under your name, then Subscriptions. Apple handles billing, so cancelling there stops it immediately for the next period, and PageTime Full keeps working until the period you have paid for ends. Full instructions are on the support page.
One hour back
Swap an hour of scrolling
for a chapter a day.
That is the whole promise, and everything in PageTime exists to make the trade visible enough to keep making.
Free to start · No account · iPhone