You set a limit on it. It just opened anyway.
There are nine ordinary reasons for Screen Time app limits not working, and they are nowhere near equally likely. Two account for most of it. The other seven are worth ten minutes of one Sunday, once.
They are in order below, most common first. Work down, stop at the first check that comes back wrong, and that is almost always the whole answer.
Start with the row that matches what you are seeing
| What is happening | Check, in this order |
|---|---|
| A grey screen appears and you get past it | 1 |
| No grey screen at all, and well over the time | 2, 8, 9 |
| The limit is in the list and has never fired | 3, 5 |
| It catches some apps in the group, not others | 2, 6 |
| It fires, but never at the hour you meant | 4 |
| It works on the phone, not the iPad | 7 |
This page is for adults who set a limit on themselves and are losing to it. Every fix below tightens a limit rather than loosens one. If somebody else set the limit on your phone, none of this helps, and the honest move is to go and have the conversation.
1. There is no Screen Time passcode, so the limit is a button
The limit runs out, a grey Time Limit screen appears, and under it sits Ignore Limit. Tap that and you are offered One More Minute, Remind Me in 15 Minutes, and Ignore Limit For Today. None of the three asks you for anything, because Apple never insists on a passcode.
The check: Settings › Screen Time, and look for a row called Lock Screen Time Settings. If the phone is offering to set one up, you do not have one. Older versions call it Use Screen Time Passcode.
The fix: set the passcode, then open each App Limit and turn on Block at End of Limit. That toggle only exists once a passcode does, which is why you have never seen it. Downtime keeps its own copy, Block at Downtime, also off by default. Ninety seconds for both.
Ninety seconds now, or a small argument with yourself every night for a year. He knows which one he would pick.
2. The limit is on a category, and the app is filed under a different one
Picking a whole category feels tidier than naming apps one by one. But you do not decide what is in a category. Screen Time does, and its idea of where an app belongs does not always match the App Store page. An app you would swear is Social gets counted elsewhere, walks past the Social limit, and nothing says so.
The check: Settings › Screen Time › See All App & Website Activity. Tap the category you limited and read the apps inside it. If yours is not there, the limit was never pointed at it.
The fix: name the app. In Add Limit, tap the category's name rather than its checkbox and the apps inside open up, so you can tick the four you mean. Where both a category limit and a per-app limit apply, the stricter wins.
3. The number is bigger than your day
A limit that never fires and a limit that is broken look identical from outside. Forty five minutes sounds severe until you look and find your real average is thirty eight. Nothing is wrong. You have never reached it.
The check: same screen, set to Day, find the app, read the number beside it. Hold that against the limit. Twenty seconds, argument over.
The fix: set the limit under your average, not over it. If the honest number is two hours, one hour forty five is a limit and two and a half hours is a permission slip. Limits refresh at midnight, so one you finally hit at 11:50pm buys ten minutes of virtue.
4. You wanted a curfew and you built a budget
App Limits are an amount. Downtime is an hour. If what you meant was nothing after ten at night, an App Limit will never do it, because an App Limit has no idea what time it is. It knows how many minutes are left, and if there are minutes left at midnight it hands them over at midnight.
This is most of the searching for a Screen Time limit not showing up. It showed up. It showed up at 4pm on a Tuesday, when you had minutes spare.
The check: look at where the rule lives. Under App Limits it is a budget. Under Downtime it is a curfew.
The fix: use both. Downtime from 10pm to 7am, plus a daily limit on the three worst apps, covers the two ways an evening goes wrong.
A budget and a curfew are different animals. You asked for one and have spent a month waiting for the other.
5. Customize Days quietly gave today its own number
Underneath the time picker in every App Limit is a control called Customize Days. Tap it and each day of the week gets its own amount. Good feature. Also why a limit behaves impeccably for five days and evaporates on the sixth: past you gave Saturday four hours, and is not here to explain.
The check: Settings › Screen Time › App Limits, tap the limit, look under the time. Seven rows with seven numbers means read the one for today.
The fix: even the days out, or leave them uneven and stop being surprised on Saturday. Both are respectable. Only one is a limit.
6. Always Allowed is beating your limit, and it is supposed to
Always Allowed is the list of apps that stay open whatever else is running. It exists so you can call somebody in an emergency, and Apple fills it in for you: Phone, Messages, FaceTime and Maps are on it before you touch anything.
It beats two things. It beats Downtime, and it beats a limit set on All Apps & Categories. So if your one big rule is the all-apps rule, everything on that list strolls through it while you watch.
The check: Settings › Screen Time › Always Allowed. Read the top list. That is your exception list, whether or not you wrote it.
The fix: take off anything that is not an emergency. Messages is the one to sit with, because Messages is where a great many evenings actually go. Keep Phone.
7. Only one of your devices ever heard about it
Screen Time settings do not travel on their own. One switch decides it. With Share Across Devices on, your limits apply to the iPhone, iPad and Mac signed in to the same Apple Account. With it off, every device keeps its own private rules, and the iPad's set is empty.
The check: Settings › Screen Time, scroll to the bottom.
The fix: turn it on, then go and look at the iPad rather than assuming. Two warnings. It only reaches devices on the same Apple Account, so an old iPad on a different one is untouched. And website restrictions on a Mac land in Safari, not in Chrome, Arc or Firefox, where most people actually browse.
8. You deleted the app once, and the limit did not survive it
A per-app limit is attached to a specific app. Take the app off the phone and the limit has nothing left to hold, and when the app comes back it comes back clean: logged in, drafts intact, unguarded.
People find this one hardest to accept, because deleting the app did not feel like beating the limit. It felt like tidying up.
The check: Settings › Screen Time › App Limits, tap the limit, read the apps inside it. If yours is no longer there, that is your answer, and it took eight seconds.
The fix: put it back, then shut the door behind you. Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions › iTunes & App Store Purchases › Deleting Apps, set to Don't Allow. You lose the ability to delete any app until you turn it back on. There are eight more doors like this one, if it is the one that keeps getting you.
9. It works fine. You turned it off.
Three ways, and not one leaves a mark you would notice while scrolling past.
Ignore Limit For Today switches the limit off until midnight and changes nothing in Settings. It still sits in the list, still says forty five minutes, still looks armed. It is not. It has the evening off.
The limit's own switch. Open any limit and there is a toggle at the top. Off looks a great deal like on from the screen before.
Turn Off App & Website Activity, at the bottom of the Screen Time screen. One tap and reporting, Downtime, App Limits and Always Allowed go together. That one at least is loud.
The check: an empty App Limits list means the third. A limit sitting there with its switch off means the second. Everything looking perfect while the app opens anyway means the first, and that one repairs itself at midnight.
Nobody is cross. It held for eleven days. Eleven is a great deal more than none.
What all nine have in common, once you line them up
Notice who did each of these. Nobody crept onto your phone and left Block at End of Limit switched off. You picked the category, gave Saturday four hours, tapped Ignore Limit For Today, deleted the app at eleven at night, or turned the whole thing off in a week that was already bad enough. That is not a scolding. It is the same design note, nine times.
Every setting on this page is you, in a calm hour, hiding keys from yourself for later.
The part the fix-it lists leave out
iOS cannot tell the difference between you and you. The person setting a forty five minute limit and the person hitting it have the same face, the same passcode and the same authority over the device, and the phone is right to believe them both.
So every fix above is one fix in nine coats: decide earlier, while the calm one is holding the phone. That works, right up until the tired one remembers where the switch is.
There are two honest ways round that. The first is another person: give somebody the passcode and make them type it in. It works, and it costs you something socially every single time you ask.
The second is something that behaves like a person and is not one, which is where we admit we make an app about this. Scrappy is a small dog who stands in front of the apps you name. Knock once, he is polite. Knock four times, he is on the doorknob, barking. He knows three rules, quiet hours, a daily limit and an open limit, and he does not have your passcode because he does not want it.
Getting past him costs a treat, and treats come out of real life: about two thousand steps of walking earns one, and one buys five honest minutes. You cannot buy them from us and we will never sell them. Cause eight has an answer too: removal lock ships switched off, closes the delete-and-reinstall loop, and takes a day to switch back off, which is deliberately longer than an urge lasts.
He is also not somewhere you have to remember to go and check, which is the whole trouble with the nine screens above. He is on the iPhone. The Mac version is not out yet.
What he'd do
- Do the checks on causes two and three before changing anything. Most limits that "do not work" were pointed at the wrong category or set above the number they were meant to catch. Both look like a broken phone from outside.
- Set the passcode, then turn on Block at End of Limit and Block at Downtime. Ninety seconds, and it takes away the button you press most. Use four digits you use nowhere else, so your thumb cannot type it without you.
- Open Always Allowed and read it out loud. Anything on it that is not a genuine emergency is an exception you did not know you had. Keep Phone. Argue with yourself about Messages.
Nine settings, or one dog.
Free to start, one whole rule, every safety rail. He does not know your passcode and does not want it.
Get Scrappy on the App StoreChecked against
- Apple's iPhone User Guide: Get started with Screen Time, Set schedules with Screen Time, and Create, manage, and keep track of a Screen Time passcode. Read 26 August 2026. The tap paths, Customize Days, Share Across Devices and Turn Off App & Website Activity come from there.
- Apple Support, Use Screen Time to manage your child's iPhone or iPad. Source for the Always Allowed defaults, and for Always Allowed beating both Downtime and an All Apps & Categories limit.
- Apple Support Communities threads on Block at End of Limit and on category versus per-app limits, read 26 August 2026. Two claims rest on those user reports rather than on Apple's own documentation: that Screen Time's category for an app can differ from the App Store's, and that the stricter of a category limit and a per-app limit wins.
- Cause eight is reasoned from a per-app limit being bound to a specific installed app, rather than walked end to end on a device for this piece. That is why its check reads go and look at the limit's own app list, and why you should.