Feature Requested By: Yang Tran
Number of Votes: 18
View Original Post: Choose Apps to blocks on Schedule Ā· Opal Feedback
Pick which apps to be blocked when I schedule opal to be running. E.g in the morning Iām scheduling to block social media and in the evening Iām scheduling to block slack, Gmail and outlook.
Comment By: Kenneth
Iāve been playing around with scheduled blocking times and perhaps it could be handy to have the option to select which app categories Iād like to block - eg I still want to block social media use 24/7 and have to pause the shield to use the apps, but I donāt want to block news websites (which would be blocked during exam shields)ā¦the more I try to articulate this the more I think I might just need to rethink the apps that I block, but hopefully you can follow my thinking.
Comment By: Kenneth
Just to give you a specific example, since chatting in generalities is always tough! I would like to lock out social media by 11pm, but then Iād also like to be able to lock out my e-reader apps and chrome by 12pm, when I need to be winding down to sleep (notorious late night reader - flashlight, clip light, phone - occasionally manage to accidentally read until the sun comes upā¦) So having 2 schedules was what I tried, but I canāt customize which schedules work on which apps. Maybe thereās a way around this with the pause function?
Comment By: Alice Oueijan
I am surprised more people donāt want this feature! And very glad to see that it is being planned 
Sorry in advance if I am misunderstanding your responses Kenneth! (We may be saying the same thing, I donāt know much about making apps lol)
Right now, I can create many āschedulesā, but there is only one āsettings:distracting appsā page in the app. So every āscheduleā blocks the same apps. But I want to block social media apps while Iām at work(9-5,weekdays), and I want to block work apps while Iām at home(morning,evening,weekends).
To me, the most intuitive way to do this would be for each āscheduleā to have its own āsettings:distracting appsā page where I can choose the categories and apps to block.
I wonder if scheduled app locks can be a thing: for example, you could have an app locked while at work but once the session is done, you can scroll it whenever, for however long you want. App locks are awesome but i found that ill just keep bypassing mindlessly when its constantly on, and turning it on and off manually is a hassle. I could also see it working well stacked with blocking sessions that can block apps completely during part of the day, and then if you snooze you can still only unlock it for a limited time. That being said, if its also possible to schedule snoozes during blocking sessions, this would work so well with it too!
Hey there,
Happy to help. While we donāt have this exact functionality, you might benefit from using a combination of our app lock and app limit feature to set up something similar:
Hope that works for you,
Sarah @ Opal