screen time, explained
How to export Screen Time data from your iPhone
There is no export button. Not in Settings, not behind a long-press, not in iCloud. Screen Time will show you about four weeks of your life in beautiful charts and will not hand you a single row of it as a file. Since iOS 26 there is, for the first time, an honest way to get the numbers out: a Shortcuts action that reads your daily totals. This guide covers that route, the manual one, and the wall that applies to every route: the four-week window. Nothing exports what the phone has already deleted.
Why there's no export button#
Screen Time is a log of your behavior, and Apple treats it accordingly: it stays on the device, expires quickly, and third-party apps get no direct way to read the record. The frameworks Apple does offer developers are built for blocking and for live displays inside strict sandboxes, not for handing over the past. That's why the App Store is full of apps that can talk at length about today and say almost nothing about your months. Whatever export exists has to run as you, on your phone, with your consent. Which is exactly what Shortcuts does.
The Shortcuts route (iOS 26)#
Since iOS 26, the Shortcuts app has an action called Get app and website activity. Point it at a day, and it returns your Screen Time for that day: which apps, how long, as data another action can use. That's the whole opening. What you do with it comes in two flavors:
The spreadsheet flavor. Build a shortcut that fetches yesterday and appends it to a note or a file, and run it every day. It works, with two honest caveats. The output's format is not a stable contract: how the entries come out shifts with how the shortcut is built and even with the device's language, so anything that parses it needs care. And the ritual is the weak point. The record lives exactly as long as your daily discipline does, and a missed week is deleted before you notice it's missing.
The app flavor. This is what finit is built on. You install two ready-made Shortcuts once, and every night they file yesterday into a permanent record: every app, every day, kept for years on your iPhone and your private iCloud. It re-checks the recent weeks against the system each night so the record stays exact, it runs with the phone locked, and there is no finit server holding your data. Same door, no ritual.
The screenshot ledger#
The zero-setup route still deserves its paragraph: open Screen Time every Sunday, screenshot the week, drop it in an album. It costs nothing and it is better than nothing. It is also, in our experience, a habit with a half-life of about three weeks, and screenshots are pictures of numbers, not numbers: nothing sums them, nothing charts them, and nobody scrolls back through forty of them to answer a real question.
If all you want is to read the weeks the phone still shows, here's how to see your Screen Time history.
The wall every route shares#
Whatever you build, it can only carry days forward; nothing recovers what iOS already deleted. The phone keeps roughly four weeks of detail, then it's gone, permanently. An export routine started today protects today onwards, and that's all. If your history is already missing, here's what happened to it. If you want the record to simply exist without you thinking about it again, that's the job finit took.
The short answers#
Can you export Screen Time data to CSV?
Not directly; Screen Time has no export function. Since iOS 26 the Shortcuts action Get app and website activity can read your daily app totals, and a shortcut can append them to a file. Apps like finit automate the same route nightly.
Does Screen Time have an API?
Not for your history. Apple's developer frameworks around Screen Time are built for blocking and for live, sandboxed displays; none of them lets an app read your past usage. The only supported way to get your data out runs through Shortcuts, on your own device.
How far back can you export Screen Time data?
About four weeks, because that is all the iPhone still has. iOS deletes older detail permanently, so no export tool, on any route, reaches further back. A lasting record can only be built forward from the day it starts.
Four hours a day is the average stake, and the phone remembers four weeks of it. That ratio is the reason this page exists, and the reason finit exists: the export you never have to remember to run. The best day to start it is the usual one.
