The oldest still-running App Store ad in EU screen time apps is written in German and runs in 20 storefronts, most of which are not German-speaking. It belongs to detoxi Health GmbH, a small German health company with 295 ad records, less than a tenth of what the category's biggest advertiser bought over the same year. Apple marks the creative as older than its one-year window, and it was still recorded on 23 July 2026.
We pulled every App Store ad nine screen time, focus and app blocker apps ran across all 25 EU storefronts from Apple's public Ad Repository, the transparency dataset the EU Digital Services Act requires, plus one adjacent habit tracker for comparison. Here is the survivor board, sorted by ad records tracked. The data window ends 24 July 2026, and no storefront query failed on this sweep.
The survivor board
| App (publisher) | Storefronts | Distinct creatives | Oldest creative still running | Records tracked |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AppBlock: Block Apps & Website (MobileSoft s.r.o.) | 25 | 20 | 233 days, "Limit Screen Time | Block Web", 23 storefronts, en-GB | 2,973 |
| Refocus: Block Apps & Websites (Labi, LLC) | 24 | 4 | 249 days, "Blocker, Limit Screen Time", 24 storefronts, en-GB | 2,407 |
| Opal: Screen Time Control (Opal OS Corporation) | 18 | 13 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Focus, App Blocker & Timer", 13 storefronts, en-GB | 554 |
| detoxi: Digital Wellbeing (detoxi Health GmbH) | 25 | 6 | Past Apple's one-year window, "Reduziere digitalen Stress", 20 storefronts, de-DE | 295 |
| minimalist phone (Hachi Media OÜ) | 11 | 5 | 97 days, "Screen Time Limit & Focus", 11 storefronts, en-GB | 135 |
| Freedom: Screen Time Control (Eighty Percent Solutions Corporation) | 5 | 13 | 82 days, three separate localized lines (DE, FR, ES), each in one storefront | 112 |
| Detox, Digital Detox App | 14 | 4 | None. Everything stopped by 23 Nov 2025 | 109 |
| Jomo, Screen Time Blocker | 1 (France) | 2 | None. Its year-plus French line was last recorded 23 Oct 2025 | 12 |
| Bloka: AI Screen Time Control (solo developer) | 1 (Italy) | 2 | None. Its Italian line ran 2 days in January 2026 | 2 |
Five readings of this table.
- German copy is holding markets that do not read German. detoxi's "Reduziere digitalen Stress" (reduce digital stress) was recorded on 23 July 2026 in AT, BE, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GR, HU, IE, LU, LV, PL, PT, RO, SE and SI. That is Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland, Finland and Sweden all carrying a German headline that Apple already dates past a year. Every other vertical we have swept runs English as the wide-market language. This one is the exception. detoxi did add an English line, "Stop mindless scrolling", first seen 27 April 2026, now 87 days across 22 storefronts and still running, so the German line predates the English one by at least nine months.
- The two heaviest advertisers do the opposite thing, and both survive. Refocus bought 2,407 records and made four creatives in the whole year. One of them, the English "Blocker, Limit Screen Time", has run 249 days across 24 storefronts and is the oldest dated survivor on the board, with 859 records on the asset version and 324 on the icon version. Its only other attempt, "Block Websites, Control Time", ran 25 days in Bulgaria, Estonia and Slovakia and stopped on 18 November 2025. No local-language line anywhere. AppBlock bought 2,973 records and made 20 creatives in seven languages: English 233 days across 23 storefronts, French 197 days, German 193, Italian 182, Portuguese 182, Dutch 166, Swedish 127, Spanish 87. All seven local lines were still running on 23 July apart from the icon-only variants. One line against twenty, 566 records apart, and neither approach has broken yet.
- The apps this crowd recommends buy no App Store ads at all. one sec, ScreenZen, Clearspace, Focus Bear, Forest, Unpluq and Focus Plant do not appear in Apple's Ad Repository entity index, which only lists entities that have ads in the repository. No EU App Store ads were recorded for any of them in this window. That is a statement about paid App Store search, not about their marketing in general.
- The best-known brand here restarted from scratch in May. Freedom holds 112 records in 5 storefronts, the smallest footprint of any established name on the board. Its English "Website & App Blocker to Focus" is past Apple's one-year window and stopped on 30 November 2025 in Germany, France, Ireland and Italy. A second line, "Limit & Block Distracting Apps", is also past the window and stopped on 4 May 2026: English copy that Apple tags es-ES, running in Spain only. On 2 May 2026 it started three brand-new single-market lines, all still running at 82 days: "App-Blocker für Bildschirmzeit" in Germany, "Bloqueur d'apps. Temps d'écran" in France, "Bloqueador de apps. Enfoque." in Spain. An English attempt on 29 April, "Block Apps. Stay Focused.", lasted 5 days and 2 records in Germany and France before it stopped on 4 May.
- Three advertisers have nothing running at all. Detox spent 109 records across 14 storefronts and stopped everything by 23 November 2025. Jomo bought 12 records in France only, and its year-plus French line was last recorded on 23 October 2025. Bloka, a solo developer, ran 2 records over 2 days in Italy in January 2026. The adjacent case is Roots, a Pomodoro and habit tracker rather than a blocker: 45 records across 23 storefronts, with "Pomodoro timer & Streaks" running 151 days before it stopped on 29 December 2025 and "Focus & Productivity booster" running 90 days before it stopped on 13 January 2026. Nothing live there either.
No advertiser in this category started a new creative in the final seven days of the window.
Where these apps buy
App Store search results, almost end to end. AppBlock's 1,173 analyzed records are all search results. Refocus: 1,200 analyzed, all search results. Opal: 518, all search results. Freedom's 112, Detox's 109 and Jomo's 12 are search results too, with nothing anywhere else.
Two advertisers buy another surface, and both are small. detoxi is the only one on all three: 218 search results, 5 search tab, 4 product page. minimalist phone splits 124 search results against 11 product page. The app holding the oldest surviving creative in the category is also the only one testing where else the ad can sit, on a twentieth of the volume of the leaders.
What the surviving copy says
Every survivor except detoxi names the mechanism, not the outcome. "Blocker, Limit Screen Time" (Refocus). "Limit Screen Time | Block Web" (AppBlock). "Focus, App Blocker & Timer" (Opal). "Screen Time Limit & Focus" (minimalist phone). The local lines hold the same shape: "App Zeitlimit & Bildschirmzeit" (AppBlock, German) and "Tempo di utilizzo schermo" (AppBlock, Italian). The headline says what the app switches off, not how you will feel afterwards.
The two outcome-led lines that survive both belong to detoxi: "Reduziere digitalen Stress" and "Stop mindless scrolling". Both still running, on the smallest volume of any advertiser with a year-plus line.
AppBlock's dead lines make the same point from the other side. Its Dutch "Stop met uitstelgedrag" (stop procrastinating) ran 29 days and stopped on 9 February 2026. Its Spanish "Distraerse menos" (get distracted less) ran 86 days and stopped on 29 April 2026, replaced by "Limitar tiempo de pantalla" (limit screen time), now 87 days and still running. Both dead lines named the behaviour. Both replacements named the feature. Jomo's dead French line is the most outcome-led on the board: "Combattre Addiction Téléphone" (fight phone addiction), one storefront, last recorded 23 October 2025.
Opal is the one that mixes. Its English line names the tools, and its Romance lines name the state: Spanish "Productividad y Concentración" (productivity and concentration) at 240 days and still running, Italian "Più concentrato e produttivo" (more focused and productive) at 194 days and still running. Its Portuguese "Seja mais focado e produtivo" ran 139 days and stopped on 13 April 2026. Worth noting where Opal puts each one: the English line runs in 13 storefronts that do not include Austria, Germany, France or Spain, so the localized lines have those four markets to themselves.
How to read this for your own category
Longevity is the cheapest performance signal you can get on a rival, and Apple publishes it for free. Nobody keeps paying for an ad that loses money, so a creative still running after a year is a creative that pays. Pull your closest rivals, sort every ad by how long it has run, and write your first creatives against the survivors rather than against the newest thing you happened to notice.
Two habits this category adds. Check what language the survivors are in before you assume English is the wide-market default: here the year-plus line is German and it holds Ireland, Spain and Poland, which is the reverse of what every other vertical we have swept would have told you to expect. Then read the gap between records bought and creatives kept. Refocus and AppBlock sit 566 records apart, and one of them has four creatives while the other has twenty, so volume on its own says nothing about how much testing a rival is doing.
Check who is missing, as well. Seven of the apps this category's own readers recommend are absent from the repository entirely. If your rival list came out of a recommendation thread rather than out of the ad data, you may be writing copy against companies that are not bidding on anything.
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. "Days running" is the span from a creative's first to last recorded impression across those markets, and "still running" means the creative was recorded on 23 July 2026, the last full day in the window. "Past Apple's one-year window" is Apple's own marker: it reports creatives older than a year as over a year rather than as a date, so we cannot date those ads more precisely than Apple does. A "creative" is one distinct ad grouped by placement, format, headline and asset count, which is why creative counts look high: the same headline usually appears twice, once as an icon ad and once as an icon plus asset ad. Record counts are repository records across the 25-storefront sweep, a proxy for volume, not euros. Apple caps each country query at about 50 records, so for the larger advertisers we analyzed fewer records than the repository holds (AppBlock 1,173 of 2,973, Refocus 1,200 of 2,407, Opal 518 of 554, detoxi 227 of 295), which is why we say records tracked rather than records read. Longevity is a proxy for performance, not a measured conversion rate. Refreshed monthly.