Upchin vs one sec

The hardest comparison on this site

So here is where one sec leads — straight away, rather than buried under the rows where it does not.

one sec costs about half what Upchin does on the yearly plan, it has a free tier, it ships in thirty languages against our twenty-one, and it is the only app in this comparison backed by peer-reviewed research — including a 2023 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Its anti-tamper locks are stronger than ours, and on iOS 26.4 it can lock the Screen Time permission itself behind a passcode you do not know.

If one sec is what you need, that is a reasonable choice, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What follows is the narrow band where the two genuinely differ. The table carries the date it was checked.

What one sec has that Upchin does not

It costs half as much, and there is a free tier. One app, the breathing exercise, indefinitely, with no advertising at any tier. On a subscription, Upchin is free and fully featured for 7 days; then it is paid, and you can cancel at any time.

It ships in thirty languages, nearly twice us. This is one of the few rows in this comparison where someone counts higher than we do, and it would be absurd to leave it out.

It is backed by published research, and we are not. Their home page cites a PNAS paper from 2023 — the source of the widely quoted 57% fewer app opens — a CHI 2024 paper, and a 2025 field experiment run by the Danish Competition and Consumer Authority. Their research page lists seven entries, three of which carry their own "peer-reviewed" marking. Two things are worth knowing rather than leaving unsaid: the developer is a co-author of the PNAS paper, which is common for intervention research, and the data comes from volunteer studies with ethics approval. Upchin has nothing comparable — we ship a library of forty-four sources on screen time, sleep and attention, which is a reading list, not evidence about our own app. That is a weaker claim, and we are not going to inflate it.

It is harder to cheat than we are: five Cheat Lock features, a lock on the Shortcuts app itself, an uninstall lock, and on iOS 26.4 a native passcode on the Screen Time permission. Upchin has no equivalent of that last one. And it reaches far more devices — iOS 15 against our iOS 26, plus the iPad and the Mac.

A breath before, a door after

This is the real design difference, and one sec states its half of it plainly: their App Store listing says the app delays access to distracting apps rather than blocking them outright, because they think the psychological difference matters.

You open Instagram, you breathe, you follow a dot, you rotate the phone — and then you go in. The intervention is always passable; the price is seconds and friction. Their Re-Intervention then taps you on the shoulder after a set time in the app, and asks for another breath to carry on.

Delay Lock asks for nothing. You open the app, you get your grace period — sixty seconds by default — then the door closes for a length you set, and reopens on its own. There is no exercise to do, because there is nothing to negotiate: the decision was made calmly, at setup, not at the moment you are holding the phone.

Theirs is a hesitation. Ours is an interval. Both hold up, and if a breath is enough for you, a breath costs less.

The screen that stops you carries different words too. one sec lets you change the sentence on the breathing screen; that is documented. The block screen is a different screen, and its text is theirs: their documentation describes it as showing which apps are blocked and until when, and a request to customise that text is open on their own suggestions forum. Upchin puts up to ten sentences you wrote on the block screen itself. Theirs accompanies the exercise; ours arrives on the screen that turns you away.

A block that starts when you start walking

one sec's documentation describes no location or movement trigger: the open request on their own public forum is even for a place that ends a block — leaving the house to lift a morning block — rather than one that starts it. You can get there indirectly, by pointing Apple's Focus at their Focus filter, or by wiring their Shortcuts action into an automation of your own.

Motion lock has nothing to wire. 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, so indoor drift does not block you while you sit still. When the walk is real, the apps you chose close.

That is the difference between the two routes: an automation, by definition, is planned. The moment you come out of the metro looking at your screen is not.

A lock that holds when nothing is running

one sec has an "everything except" mode — Block All with chosen exemptions — but it is configured inside a single block or a single schedule, not as a standing state of the phone.

And here they do something we respect enough to quote: their own known-issues page says that choosing "Block all" blocks every app and ignores the exempted list, and advises putting your exemptions in Apple's "Always Allowed" list instead. That is a publisher documenting a live bug in a paid feature, on a public page.

Upchin's "everything except" web lock is permanent: it holds outside any block, with nothing running and nothing scheduled. It has a cost we print in our own app — it blocks web pages inside apps too, and our text tells you not to use the mode if that is too much.

On adult sites, though, theirs covers every browser and every web view on the phone, exactly as ours does, and that deserves saying. For chosen sites on iPhone, theirs is limited to Safari. And the watch row is ours: their metadata lists no Watch model, where Upchin has a watch app and complications for the face.

The short version

one sec costs half our price, speaks thirty languages, has published research and stronger anti-tamper locks than ours. On a comparison this close, those four rows weigh a lot.

one sec if a breath is enough for you — and for many people it is, which is precisely what their research suggests — if price matters, or if your device does not go up to iOS 26.

Upchin if the breath is not enough: a door that closes rather than a hesitation, a block that starts from walking with nothing to wire, a web lock that holds when nothing is running, and your own sentences on the screen that stops you.