Upchin vs Jomo

The same foundation, and three places where they part

Jomo is made in Europe by a small team, it has a free tier that keeps working, it runs on the Mac and Apple Vision as well as the iPhone, and its yearly plan costs the same as ours to the cent.

The two also share a foundation and its limits. Both block through Apple's Screen Time framework, both let you pick individual apps or whole categories, both save reusable lists, and both live under the same cap of 49 apps and 49 websites that Apple imposes on everyone.

So this is the page where three precise differences matter most. The table carries the date it was checked.

What Jomo has that Upchin does not

It has a free tier, and we do not. One block, one limit, one budget, kept indefinitely. On a subscription, Upchin is free and fully featured for 7 days; then it is paid, and you can cancel at any time. And its paid plan costs exactly what ours does, so there is no bargain to point at.

It reaches far more phones, iOS 16 where we ask for iOS 26, and it runs where we do not: a Mac app with keyword and per-page wildcard blocking, plus Apple Vision.

It simply has more machinery: seven unlock exercises against our one, Strict Mode across four scopes, NFC tags, a journal, templates, habit routines, Focus filter syncing.

And their help centre is frank, which is rarer in this field than it sounds: they write themselves that Strict Mode is off by default, that Open Limits were removed in version 2.0 and survive only as legacy, that a Lock's counter "goes unlimited" past twenty opens a day, and that a known iOS 17.4 conflict between screen-time apps affects their "All except" list in particular.

The one place to read the table rather than either marketing page is privacy. Their App Store description says Jomo will never see your private data; their privacy label declares user content used to track you across other companies' apps, and their policy names Amplitude, Facebook and OpenAI among their processors, with servers in the Netherlands. Both sources are Jomo's own, and we point at them without drawing the conclusion for you.

Movement that blocks, not movement that unlocks

This is the one that surprised us.

Jomo reads your step count through Apple Health and uses it as a reward: their own walkthrough gives the example of walking 5,000 steps to fully unlock Netflix. Movement earns the phone back. For GPS proper, their article routes you through Apple's Shortcuts app — arriving somewhere starts a block, leaving stops it.

Motion lock works the other way. It is not a reward and it is not an arrival. It watches for the moment you actually set off — GPS confirms displacement of more than 5 metres and only counts it when the margin of error on the reading is smaller than that distance — and when the walk is real, your blocked apps close.

One app hands you the phone because you walked. The other takes it away while you are walking. Both hold up, and they are not the same product.

A lock that re-arms, and a screen that asks nothing

Jomo's two usage-driven rules are the Limit — a daily budget, fifteen minutes of Instagram a day — and the Lock, which keeps an app shut by default and grants a few timed openings. Both are allowances: a reserve that drains.

Delay Lock has no reserve. Each opening is measured on its own: a delay before the block, then a block of the length you set — thirty seconds by default, up to an hour, and the pre-installed Pomodoro card sets it to twenty-five minutes. Then the delay starts again, at full length, next time and every time. A budget ends your day when you have spent it; this one is not spent.

And the screen itself asks nothing of you. Jomo has seven unlock exercises — show proof to an AI, wait, give a reason, enter a password, scan a QR code, look at yourself, or retype a text — and since one of their releases, that text to retype can be your own words. It is user-written text, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. But look at what it is for: it is the obstacle you cross to get in. The block screen itself carries Jomo's text — their Expert Tips and Healthy Alternatives, whose translation their release notes track.

Upchin's words are on the other side: up to ten sentences you wrote, shown in turn, asking nothing. A text you have to retype is a toll. A text you wrote is a message.

Two ways to be strict on the web, and both have a price

Jomo covers this carefully, laying out two methods with the trade-off of each: type a domain into a block, which also disables private browsing on iOS 16 to 18, or pick sites from Apple's list, which only holds for Safari and which they warn can disrupt Facebook, Amazon and YouTube. They even name the domains not to select.

Upchin cannot type a domain. What it has instead is a lock that holds outside any rule — everything blocked except the sites on your list, with nothing running and nothing scheduled. Jomo's equivalent, "All except", is a setting on a rule rather than a state of the app. And ours has a cost we print in the app itself: it blocks web pages inside apps too, and our own text says that if adding every blocked site to your list is not enough for you, you should not use the mode. We hold ourselves to the standard we hold them to on this page.

Two shorter rows to finish: Jomo ships in eleven languages, Upchin in twenty-one. And their metadata lists no Watch model, where Upchin has a watch app and complications for the face.

The short version

Jomo is the biggest app in this comparison, and it is free to start. If either of those two points settles it for you, it is right there.

Jomo if you want the machinery — seven ways to earn an opening, a Mac app, NFC tags — if you are not going to pay, or if your device does not go up to iOS 26.

Upchin if you want what Jomo offers on none of its plans: a block that fires when you start walking rather than when you arrive, your own sentence waiting on the screen instead of one to retype, and the day's figures on your wrist.