Apple's own picker leaves four apps out, on every Screen Time app, not only Furlough: Safari, Settings, the App Store, and Phone. Furlough cannot add what the picker will not offer. Here is what that means for each, and what actually helps.
Safari
Safari itself is not a target, but the sites you open in it are: block a domain and it is closed in Safari (and in Chrome and every other browser on the phone) at the times and budget you set. That is what to reach for — one site at a time, the same way as any other website in Furlough. There is no single switch yet that closes all of Safari's web at once; if that changes, this page will say so.
Settings and the App Store
Neither can be shielded, by Furlough or by anything built on the same API — Apple keeps its own Settings and the App Store out of the picker for every app that uses it. What helps is not a block but friction: a Shortcuts automation that sends you back to the Home Screen the moment either one opens.
- Open Shortcuts › Automation › + › Create Personal Automation.
- Choose App, then Is Opened, and pick Settings. Repeat for the App Store as a second automation.
- Add the action Go to Home Screen.
- Optional: add Furlough's own Drop Anchor action underneath it, so opening either app also locks whatever the Anchor holds.
- Turn off Ask Before Running, so it fires without a prompt.
This is friction, not a lock. An automation lives in the Shortcuts app, and anything you can turn on you can turn off — including this one, in a few taps, any time you like. It buys you the same thing a tag in another room buys the Anchor: a pause before you get what you were about to get anyway. The one real escape from Furlough itself is still Settings › Screen Time › Apps with Screen Time Access › Furlough › off, and no automation changes that.
Not yet run on a phone. These steps are written from how Shortcuts automations work; nobody has built and used this one yet. If a step reads differently on your phone, that is the thing to fix here.
Phone
Phone is left out of the picker too, and Furlough leaves it alone on purpose rather than offering the same trick. A phone you cannot call out from is not a commitment device, it is a hazard — and Furlough already treats an app that carries something you might need in an emergency as worth a warning, never a block. If Phone itself is the distraction, the honest answer is that Furlough is not the tool for that part.
On the Mac
The Mac has no picker at all — no Screen Time API to draw one from — so it reads instead: every window of Safari and the Chromium browsers (Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Opera, Dia), tab by tab, redirected to Furlough's shield the moment a blocked host shows up there. A tab is the whole of what that reader can see, and three things live outside it.
- Firefox is not scriptable the way the others are, so none of its tabs can be read.
- Safari web apps saved to the Dock run under their own identifier rather than Safari's, so the same host inside one of those is not caught either.
- Anything that reaches a blocked host without a browser tab — an app with its own network code — is invisible to a reader built on browser windows.
The web filter covers all three. It is a system extension that watches every connection this Mac opens and refuses the ones going to a site you have blocked, whichever app opened it — so Firefox, a web app in the Dock and an app loading a site on its own are all enforced once it is on. They get Furlough's floating card rather than the shield page, since there is no tab to redirect.
It is yours to turn on rather than something Furlough installs behind you. Furlough has to be in your Applications folder, and macOS asks twice: once to allow the extension, under System Settings › General › Login Items & Extensions, and once to let it filter. Inside Furlough, Settings › Web says where it stands and takes it back off again.
Not yet run on a Mac. The filter is built and tested, but installing a system extension takes two approvals in front of the screen and nobody has given them yet. If what you see differs from this, that is the thing to fix here.
More: Apps and websites · All help · support@furloughapp.com