The app blocker you cannot delete does not exist

Type "app blocker that cannot be deleted" into a search bar and you will find a genuinely large number of products promising exactly that. It is worth understanding what they can and cannot mean by it, because the difference decides whether the thing works for you in six weeks.

The platform rules, plainly

Both mobile platforms treat the owner's ability to remove software as a guarantee rather than a preference. This is deliberate, and on balance you want it: the alternative is an ecosystem where an app you installed once can refuse to leave.

On iOS, an app cannot prevent its own deletion. What exists instead is Screen Time's Content & Privacy Restrictions, where "Deleting Apps" can be set to "Don't Allow" — a system-level setting, protected by the Screen Time passcode, which applies to apps generally. It is real protection, and it has one obvious property: you set the passcode, so you can clear it. Third-party blockers on iOS work through the Screen Time and Family Controls frameworks and inherit exactly this shape.

On Android, an app can register as a device administrator, which historically complicated uninstallation — the app must be de-administered before it can be removed, adding a step in a menu most people never open. Google has narrowed what device admin can do across releases, and the flow remains available to a user who wants out. Beyond that, an Android app can be uninstalled from Settings, from the launcher, in Safe Mode, or via a second user profile.

So: slower, more conspicuous, more annoying. Not impossible. Any product claiming otherwise on a consumer phone is describing friction and calling it a wall.

The one case where it is true

Managed devices are different, and the difference is instructive.

A phone enrolled in mobile device management — a corporate fleet, a school deployment, a supervised device configured by someone else — really can enforce restrictions the user cannot lift. The mechanism is not clever software. It is that the administrator and the user are two different people. The restriction holds because the person who wants it lifted does not hold the key.

That is the entire trick, and it is not available to you on your own phone, because on your own phone you are both parties. Every consumer product in this category is trying to simulate a second person, and the simulation is only ever as good as your willingness to keep pretending.

What "hard to delete" is actually buying

Friction is not worthless. It is worth being precise about what it buys.

Suppose uninstalling your blocker takes ninety seconds through an unfamiliar settings menu, with a confirmation dialog and a mild sense of defeat. At 9pm, mildly bored, that is often enough — the effort exceeds the impulse and you put the phone down.

At 1am, three hours into a session you did not plan, the calculation is different. The ninety seconds are still ninety seconds. Your willingness to spend them has gone up considerably. The cost of the exit is fixed while your motivation to pay it is rising, so the barrier is weakest exactly when it is most needed.

This is the structural problem with the whole category, and it is the subject of every app blocker becomes a parent. The escape hatch is cheapest at the moment its holder most wants out.

Worse, the failure is usually invisible. On Android, manufacturer battery management can stop a blocker's background service without notifying anyone — covered in why your screen time limits stopped working. You do not experience that as "my blocker was killed". You experience it as a quiet evening where nothing appeared.

Four things that genuinely raise the cost

Ordered by how well they survive contact with a tired person.

1. Put the passcode with another person. This is the honest version of what managed devices do. Someone else sets the Screen Time passcode and does not tell you. It works because it reintroduces the missing second party, and it fails the moment that person is asleep, unreachable, or willing to be talked round. It also costs something real in the relationship, which is worth weighing before you ask.

2. Use hardware. A physical token you must tap to unblock, a lockbox with a timer, a second device with nothing on it. These work by putting distance between you and the exit — distance that does not shrink at 1am, because it is made of metres rather than seconds. The cost is that you have to carry, charge and not lose an object.

3. Delay the exit rather than blocking it. A blocker that permits disabling but only after a wait it will not skip converts an impulse into a plan. This is the most under-used mechanism in the category, and it is the same reasoning behind our own thirty-minute delay on top-ups: a purchase made inside a reflex is not a decision.

4. Attach a cost that does not fall as your resistance falls. Seconds get cheaper as the night goes on. Money does not. A fixed price on going past your limit is the one form of friction whose value holds steady precisely when everything else is collapsing — which is the argument for commitment devices generally, and the reason our own product is built the way it is.

What we do, and what we do not claim

Last Ferry gives the apps that eat your day one shared daily budget. When it runs out they lock, and going past the lock costs real money from a balance you topped up in advance — $0.50 for the first unlock of the day, $1.00 for the second, $2.50 after that.

It is built so it does not quietly stop working: the block is a real screen rather than a dismissible notification, the protection runs in its own process so closing the app does not stop it, and reopening a blocked app repeatedly shortens the grace period rather than granting a free pass.

And you can uninstall it. In about a minute, from Settings, like anything else. We are not going to tell you otherwise, because the claim would be false and because a product that needed that claim to work would be admitting its mechanism does not.

The bet we are making is different: that a price you agreed to in advance, printed before you pay it, does more at 1am than any amount of friction that only costs you time.