The oldest screen time ad still running in the EU is in German, and it runs in 20 storefronts, most of them not German-speaking. Every other category we have pulled treats English as the language you buy the small markets in and a local language as the thing you add for Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Screen time apps do not agree with each other about that at all. Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, records the copy, the language tag and the country of every App Store ad, so all four of the postures in this category are readable from outside. Data window ends 24 July 2026, all 25 EU storefronts.
The German line running in Ireland, Spain and Poland
detoxi Health GmbH's "Reduziere digitalen Stress" (reduce digital stress) is past Apple's one-year window, so Apple will not date it more precisely than over a year, and it was still recorded on 23 July 2026. It runs in AT, BE, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GR, HU, IE, LU, LV, PL, PT, RO, SE and SI.
Three of those twenty are German-speaking. The rest include Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Finland and Sweden. German copy, held for more than a year, in markets that do not read German. detoxi is a small German health GmbH with 295 records tracked, less than a tenth of AppBlock's volume, and it is the one advertiser here whose longest-lived creative sells an outcome instead of a mechanism. It did later add an English line, "Stop mindless scrolling", first seen 27 April 2026, 87 days across 22 storefronts, still live. The German one is still the older and wider of the two.
Why it works is outside what the repository can tell us. What it does tell us is that nobody at detoxi has switched it off in over a year of paying for it.
Posture one: translate everything
AppBlock (MobileSoft s.r.o.) has 2,973 records tracked across all 25 storefronts and 20 distinct creatives, more than any other advertiser here. It runs an English line, "Limit Screen Time | Block Web", for 233 days across 23 storefronts, still live at the window close, and seven local-language lines underneath it:
| Language | Days running |
|---|---|
| French (fr-FR) | 197 |
| German (de-DE) | 193 |
| Italian (it) | 182 |
| Portuguese (pt-PT) | 182 |
| Dutch (nl) | 166 |
| Swedish (sv) | 127 |
| Spanish (es-ES) | 87 |
All seven were still recorded on 23 July 2026, apart from some icon-only variants. The copy is the same promise in each language rather than a per-market rewrite: "App Zeitlimit & Bildschirmzeit" in German (app time limit and screen time), "Tempo di utilizzo schermo" in Italian (screen usage time). Feature names, translated.
Posture two: translate nothing
Refocus (Labi, LLC) has 2,407 records tracked and four creatives in the entire year. One of them carries the business: "Blocker, Limit Screen Time", English, 249 days across 24 storefronts, still live. That is the longest dated run of any creative in this category. Its only other line of consequence, "Block Websites, Control Time", ran 25 days in Bulgaria, Estonia and Slovakia and stopped on 18 November 2025.
There is no local-language Refocus creative anywhere in the EU, including in Germany, France and Spain. The company with the second-highest volume in the category has never paid a translator, and its English line has outrun every translated line in this data.
Posture three: split the map
Opal: Screen Time Control (554 records tracked, 18 storefronts, 13 creatives) does something the other two do not. Its English line, "Focus, App Blocker & Timer", is past Apple's one-year window and still live, and it runs in exactly 13 storefronts: BE, BG, CZ, DK, EE, FI, HR, IE, IT, NL, PL, RO, SE.
Austria, Germany, France and Spain are not on that list. Those four markets get a local line instead, and no English at all. The three creatives that cover them all started on 25 November 2025 and were still live at 240 days: "Fokus, Website Limit & Blocker" (focus, website limit and blocker) in Austria and Germany, "Bloquage et Limite d'Apps" (app blocking and limits) in France, "Productividad y Concentración" (productivity and concentration) in Spain. Italian and Dutch lines came later and sit alongside the English one in those markets: "Più concentrato e produttivo" (more focused and productive) at 194 days from 10 January, "App & Website Impuls Blokkeer" (app and website impulse block) at 143 days from 2 March. The Portuguese line, "Seja mais focado e produtivo" (be more focused and productive), ran 139 days and stopped on 13 April 2026.
If you run English and a local language in the same market, you are testing which one wins. Opal has instead decided in advance where English is worth buying, so it is not paying for both lines in the same place.
Posture four: kill the English line and restart localized
Freedom is the best-known brand in this category and has the smallest footprint of anyone in it: 112 records tracked, 5 storefronts. Its English line "Website & App Blocker to Focus" was past Apple's one-year window and stopped on 30 November 2025 in Germany, France, Ireland and Italy. A second year-plus line, tagged Spanish but written in English as "Limit & Block Distracting Apps", stopped on 4 May 2026.
Then on 2 May 2026 Freedom came back with three brand-new single-market lines, each in one language, each in one storefront, all three still live at 82 days:
| Market | Creative |
|---|---|
| Germany | "App-Blocker für Bildschirmzeit" (app blocker for screen time) |
| France | "Bloqueur d'apps. Temps d'écran" (app blocker. screen time.) |
| Spain | "Bloqueador de apps. Enfoque." (app blocker. focus.) |
It also tried one more English line, "Block Apps. Stay Focused.", starting 29 April 2026 in Germany and France. That one lasted 5 days and 2 records and came off on 4 May. Freedom now has no English creative running in the EU.
The languages nobody writes
Across the whole category, local-language creatives appear in seven languages and no others: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Swedish. Swedish appears once, on AppBlock's 127-day line.
Nobody has written a Bulgarian, Croatian, Greek, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Slovak, Polish, Danish or Finnish screen time ad in this window. All ten see English from AppBlock and Refocus, and seven of them (Czechia, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Poland and Romania) also see detoxi's German line. If you are wondering whether to get your copy translated into Polish because your competitors have, they have not.
The two lines AppBlock killed, and what changed in the replacement
AppBlock is the one advertiser here with enough creatives to show its own failures.
Its Dutch line "Stop met uitstelgedrag" (stop procrastinating) ran 29 days and stopped on 9 February 2026. Its Spanish line "Distraerse menos" (get distracted less) ran 86 days and stopped on 29 April 2026, and the Spanish creative that replaced it is "Limitar tiempo de pantalla" (limit screen time), 87 days and still live.
Both of the dead lines named the behaviour they wanted to change, and the copy that replaced them names the feature instead. That pattern holds across the category: every survivor except detoxi names the mechanism rather than the outcome, and detoxi is the one whose year-plus German line sells the outcome. One counterexample in a category this small is worth noticing rather than explaining away.
What to do with this if you are one person
- You do not need to translate to survive here. Refocus is 2,407 records and 249 days on a single English line across 24 storefronts. If translation is the reason you have not launched in Europe yet, launch in English and come back to it.
- If you do translate, translate where everyone else does. Every advertiser in this category that writes local copy writes German, French, Spanish and Italian, then Portuguese and Dutch. Nobody writes the other ten languages, so there is no competitive pressure to.
- Consider withholding English from the markets you translated. Opal's English line skips Austria, Germany, France and Spain and runs in 13 other storefronts, and both halves of that split are still live. Buying two languages in one market means paying twice to answer one question.
- Name the feature, not the habit. "Limit Screen Time", "Block Web", "App Blocker & Timer", "Limitar tiempo de pantalla" (limit screen time). The two lines AppBlock buried both described the user's behaviour instead: "Stop met uitstelgedrag" (stop procrastinating) lasted 29 days.
- Restarting is normal. Freedom scrapped a creative older than a year and rebuilt in three languages from zero on 2 May 2026. Age is not a reason to keep a line, and every creative Freedom is currently running is 82 days old or younger.
You can pull any advertiser at recao.app, free, no account, in about a minute.
Method note: figures are computed from Apple's public Ad Repository (DSA Article 39), swept across all 25 EU storefronts with zero failed country queries, data window ending 24 July 2026. Language is read from Apple's defaultLanguageTag on the creative plus the storefronts it ran in. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression, and "still live" means the creative was recorded on 23 July 2026. Apple reports creatives older than its one-year window as over a year rather than a date, so those cannot be dated more precisely here. Records are repository records tracked, a proxy for volume and not for spend, and for the larger advertisers Apple caps each country query at around 50 records, so we did not read every one. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.