Frequently asked questions

They form three escalating stages of friction:

Heads Up — a friendly warning 5 and 1 minute before a checkpoint — nothing is blocked yet.

SNAP — a forced pause at 1/3 and 2/3 of your allowance — short, and passes once you finish reflecting.

Curfew — a full lockout once you hit 100% of your allowance — the app stays locked until reset.

Every day at 4:00 AM. Your usage counters, the shield lock, and curfew status all clear automatically, and your full daily allowance is available again.

Go to the Shield tab → Modify Shield to re-run setup for your allowance, protected days, and tracked apps. This is only available while your shield is unarmed for the day.

Yes. While you're choosing your distractions, switch to the Websites tab and add them there. Your iPhone blocks them for you, using the same screen you see when you open a blocked app.

On the free plan, a website uses up your single slot, the same way an app does.

It shouldn't. Cue doesn't sit in the background watching the clock — that's what drains a phone, and Cue is built specifically to avoid it.

Your phone only wakes Cue when there's a reason to: when you open one of your distraction apps, and when you reach one of your limits. In between, Cue isn't doing anything at all.

The one exception is while your reminder video is playing, when Cue holds the screen on so your phone doesn't go dark halfway through it.

If you do notice Cue using more battery than you'd expect, send it to us through Report a Bug in your Profile tab, with a screenshot of your battery screen.

Screen Time is the part of your iPhone that knows how long you spend in each app. It's the only way Apple lets Cue notice when you've opened something distracting and put a pause screen up when you reach your limit.

Cue uses it for two things: counting your time in the apps you chose, and showing your pause screen. That's all. It applies to your own phone — you're not setting up parental controls for someone else.

Without this permission, Cue can't do anything at all.

Cue uses Android's Accessibility Service for two things: detecting which app is in the foreground, and — for browsers specifically — reading the address bar text so it can tell if you've navigated to a distracting website (not just opened the browser app). Cue does not read keystrokes, page content, messages, or anything you type — only the app package name and, in a browser, the URL currently shown in the address bar.

This lets Cue draw the SNAP and Curfew screens on top of whatever app you're using, so the interruption can't be swiped away or ignored. Without it, Cue could only send a notification — not actually pause you.

During setup you record a short 15-second personal reminder video that plays back during a SNAP checkpoint. It's recorded once and stored only on your device — Cue never streams or accesses your camera in the background.

No — all four permissions are required. Accessibility and Overlay are what let Cue detect distraction usage and show intercept screens at all. Camera and microphone are not optional: recording your personal reminder video is a core part of setup, not an extra feature — the video-based SNAP checkpoint is what Cue is built around, so there's no reduced mode without it.

SNAP is a short, forced checkpoint that appears exactly at 1/3 and 2/3 of your daily allowance. It gives you a breathing pause and a short video, then asks you to consciously choose whether to keep going or close the app — a moment of awareness, not a full block.

"Continue Browsing" stays disabled until the reflection video ends, so the pause has a real minimum length. That friction is intentional — it's designed to interrupt autopilot scrolling with the same intent it took to open the app in the first place.

Once you hit your first warning threshold for the day, Cue arms the shield and freezes your allowance, tracked apps, and protected days so you can't loosen your own limits mid-session — the whole point is to remove that option in the moment of temptation. Settings become editable again after your 4:00 AM daily reset, or you can leave and re-enter setup via Modify Shield beforehand if the shield isn't armed yet.

Same reason as above: once your shield is armed for the day, the master toggle freezes along with everything else so you can't talk yourself out of your own limits in the moment. It unlocks again after the daily reset, or, with Cue Pro, you can use Emergency Unlock if it's genuinely urgent.

Yes — that's technically possible, and by app store policy Cue cannot prevent you from uninstalling it or revoking permissions. Cue is a commitment device, not a jail: it works by making the mindful choice easier than the workaround, not by making the workaround impossible.

That button can't open Cue directly — Apple doesn't allow a block screen to launch an app.

What happens instead is that Cue sends you a notification a moment later. Tap it and you'll land on your message.

If you've turned Cue's notifications off, just open Cue from your Home Screen. It knows you were interrupted and takes you straight there.

Your iPhone doesn't give Cue a running count. It only speaks up when you've actually reached one of your limits — your warning, your two pause points, and your curfew — and stays quiet in between.

That's why the number on your home screen moves in jumps instead of counting up second by second.

Your limits still arrive exactly on time. It's only the display that catches up in steps.

The free plan protects one app, so a longer list has to come down to one.

Because your iPhone doesn't tell Cue which app is which, Cue can't make that choice for you — and it won't guess, in case it drops the one you cared about most. So it asks you to pick.

Free covers one distraction app, a daily allowance of up to 30 minutes on any day of the week, and two 30-minute Deep Focus sessions a day. Website blocking and Emergency Unlock aren't included.

Cue Pro removes those limits: protect as many apps as you like along with the websites that go with them, set any allowance you want, use Deep Focus as often as you like, and use Emergency Unlock twice per calendar month. Everything else — Heads Up, SNAP, Curfew, your reminder video — works exactly the same on both.

Yes. The trial converts to a paid subscription automatically unless you cancel at least 24 hours before it ends. Cue sends a reminder notification two days beforehand, and you can check the exact end date under Profile → Billing and Membership.

Cancel at any point during the trial and you keep Cue Pro until its final day, with nothing charged.

The free trial comes with the yearly plan only. The monthly plan starts right away, with no trial.

Cancellation is handled by Google Play or the App Store — no app is permitted to cancel a subscription on your behalf, so it can't be done inside Cue. The quickest route is Profile → Billing and Membership → Manage subscription, which opens your store's subscription page directly.

You can also get there yourself: on Android, Play Store → profile icon → Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions. On iPhone, Settings → your name → Subscriptions.

Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep Cue Pro until the end of the period you've already paid for.

No — and this is the one that catches people out. Your subscription belongs to your Google or Apple account, not to the copy of Cue on your phone. Deleting the app, clearing its data, or resetting the device does not cancel anything, and you will keep being billed. To actually stop payments you have to cancel in the store first (see above), then uninstall.

If you reinstall Cue later, tap Profile → Restore purchases to bring Pro back on the same store account.

Your local data is a different story. Usage history, shield settings, and your reminder video are stored only on the device and are permanently deleted — those can't be restored by anything, so you'll run through setup and record a new video.

Cue keeps working — you drop to the free tier rather than losing the app. But your setup is automatically brought down to the free limits without asking: tracked apps are trimmed to one, your allowance is capped at 30 minutes, and any websites you were blocking are removed. On iPhone, Cue can't tell which app you'd want to keep, so it asks you to choose again rather than picking for you.

Worth knowing before you cancel: this replaces your old setup. If you subscribe again later, your previous allowance, app list, and protected days don't come back — you set them up fresh.

Tap Profile → Restore purchases first — that re-checks your purchase with the store and resolves it in most cases, particularly after a reinstall or a new phone.

If it still doesn't appear, the usual cause is being signed into a different Google or Apple account than the one that paid; subscriptions can't be moved between accounts. Confirm the subscription shows as active on your store's subscription page — and if it does and Cue still disagrees, use Report a Bug in your Profile tab.

No. It's saved to your phone's local app storage and only ever played back locally inside the SNAP screen. It is never uploaded, transmitted, or shared with Cue or anyone else.

Mostly just time. Cue detects which app is in the foreground and for how long — and, for known browsers, it also reads the address bar text to check whether you're on a distracting website. It never reads page content, messages, or anything you type.

Your day-to-day tracked usage (the running seconds/minutes counted toward your allowance) is stored locally in an on-device database and is never synced to a server. However, Cue does send some setup data to Firebase Analytics: the list of apps you mark as distractions (name + category) and the screen-time estimate you give during onboarding, along with standard screen-view events and anonymized crash reports. Your reminder video always stays local and is never uploaded under any circumstance.

No — your iPhone deliberately keeps that private, even from Cue.

When you pick your apps, iPhone doesn't pass along their names. It gives Cue a locked reference it isn't allowed to open. Cue can ask your iPhone to display the icon and title on your Shield screen, but it can never read them itself.

So your app names stay on your phone. They aren't included in anything Cue records, because Cue never learns them in the first place.