The requirements
- An iPhone running iOS 16.4 or later.
- Screen Time available and on. Specifically, Settings → Screen Time → App & Website Activity must be enabled, since that is the machinery every gate rides on. Tollgate walks you through this if it is off.
- About 1 GB of free storage is wise. Not for Tollgate itself (it is small) but because iOS starts dropping Screen Time events when storage runs critically low, which makes shields unreliable.
That is the entire list. No account, no other apps, and the gate itself works offline.
What Tollgate does not run on
- iPad. Tollgate is iPhone only today. It is not on the iPad App Store, and there is no iPad optimized layout.
- Mac. Apple does not offer Screen Time app shielding to third parties on the Mac at all, so the gate is impossible there, for anyone. If you open Tollgate where Screen Time blocking does not exist, it says so honestly rather than pretending to guard.
- Apple Watch. No watch app. The scroll does not live there anyway.
- The iOS Simulator. For developers and the curious: Screen Time APIs are absent from the simulator, so the picker and shield need real hardware.
- Android. Planned, honestly discussed here.
Fine print
- The app runs in portrait and is designed for one hand at 11 pm, which is when it earns its keep.
- One iPhone per copy of your data: there is no cloud sync between devices. Your subscription follows your Apple ID, your stats stay with the phone that earned them.
- The Share Across Devices Screen Time setting can confuse the usage count and is worth turning off if gate timing seems random.