Ah, the mind-numbing discussion that always comes up whenever I ask these kind of questions. There's much to say, but here is a short version of my point of view as someone who's been bombarded with exhortations to discipline online since I started experiencing work-related issues 15 years ago:
discipline is at best a tautological concept, especially when regurgitated without any extensive guidelines for implementation ("You should force yourself to do the thing you need to do"), and at worst a harmful one, preventing people to either confront the root causes of their inability to do things they want to do (whether it be subconscious unhappiness about the thing itself or more insidious external factors), or to seek help from a specialist who might guide them towards appropriate care if the issue stems from a disorder (to speak broadly).
Thanks to @Novalissoide for offering some much needed pushback.
Now, to get back to the technical issue at hand :
@Johnnyloans: OTL was granted the "Draw over other apps" permission, but not the Accessibility service one (I fail to understand what it's used for exactly). I'll try switching it on to see if it changes anything.
I see no option to set it as device admin, where would that be? And would that be a danger to my phone in any way?
@DeletedUser728: I've tried installing RethinkDNS from F-Droid previously, but couldn't make it work either.
When you say block access to the rdns app, you mean simply through OpenTimeLimit, as a second hurdle to clear for circumventing it? In that case, the issue remains that both can be uninstalled by a single swipe. I've thought about setting a secondary account as admin (for which I'd use a random password stored elsewhere) to prevent such things, but needing to input the admin password to access my restricted session whenever my phone has shut down puts me off entirely.
Could you expand on the HW key thing? Can it somehow be used to prevent uninstalling RethinkDNS?
@DeletedUser720 : I have not found logs anywhere in the app. It acts very strange: yesterday, after exploring the app a little bit without changing any settings, it started timing app use properly, but for 1 or 2 min at most before it stopped. I will delve into the documentation to see if there is any solution to that, but all suggestions are welcome.
And just to give idea of what would be the ideal solution, I am perfectly satisfied with Leechblock on my laptop. Here are the features I enjoy and that work for me:
- It has an easy to set block list with different groups allowing for different behavior.
- It has a randomly generated 128-characters password which prevents access to its options, or to uninstall the extension (by blocking about:addons on Firefox). It is annoying enough for me not to bother typing the password whenever I feel the urge to doomscroll, but also easy enough to circumvent if for whatever reason I really need to get around the blocking, or modify the block list.
- It would be easy enough for me to install another browser to circumvent the blocking, but I generally don't, since I have firefox set up how I want.
I did at some point use chromium to go around leechblock. I resolved the issue by installing leechblock on chromium, blocking everything. Even if I were to reinstall chromium, leechblock remains installed (through, I assume, some config file).
The issue wouldn't even arise on GOS with Vanadium being the only reasonable option.
That is enough to prevent me from refreshing some random social media anytime my mind wants to wander.