screen time, explained
How far back does Screen Time go?
About four weeks. Your iPhone counts every minute of your screen time (precisely, per app, per day) and keeps that detail for roughly the last four weeks. Then it deletes it. Not archived, not tucked into a backup you could dig out someday: gone.
You can check the wall yourself. Open Settings → Screen Time, tap into the activity charts, and page backward through the weeks. Somewhere around a month ago, the past simply ends. The phone that logged all of it no longer remembers any of it.
What Screen Time still shows you#
Inside its four-week window, Screen Time is genuinely detailed. You get day-by-day totals, time per app and per category, the websites inside the browser, how often you picked the phone up, which app you opened first, how many notifications arrived and from where. You can flip between a daily view and a weekly view, and compare a week against the one before it.
That is the whole offer: a rolling month of memory, mostly there so limits and downtime have numbers behind them. As a self-check it works. As a record, it evaporates on a schedule.
Can you see Screen Time from months ago?#
No. There is no view, no setting, and no export inside Screen Time that reaches further back than the rolling window. The detail from three months ago wasn't moved somewhere cold. It was deleted on your device. iCloud sync doesn't change this: syncing merges your devices, not your past. "Share Across Devices" shows your iPad and your iPhone in one chart, and both of them forget on the same schedule.
This surprises people at exactly the wrong moment. The interesting questions about your attention are all questions about spans: did the new job change anything? The move? The resolution you made in January? By the time you think to ask, the evidence has been rolling off for months.
Why Apple deletes it#
Nothing sinister. Screen Time was built as a parental-controls and self-check feature, not as an archive. Keeping the detail forever was never the goal, and a short window is also the conservative choice for a privacy-sensitive record; this is a log of your behavior, and Apple treats it accordingly. For the same reason, iOS gives apps no direct way to read that record either, which is why most screen-time apps can talk at length about today and say almost nothing about your years.
How to keep more than four weeks#
There are two real options, in ascending order of one-time effort:
- Do it by hand. A screenshot or a spreadsheet row every Sunday. It works, it costs nothing, and almost nobody sustains it past week three. The record dies the first weekend you're busy, which is precisely the kind of weekend worth recording.
- Let an app keep it for you. That's what finit does: you set up two Shortcuts once, and every night it files yesterday into a permanent record. Every app, every day, kept for years. It re-checks the recent weeks against the system each night so the record stays exact, and it runs with the phone locked, no Wi-Fi required. The record lives on your iPhone and in your own private iCloud; there is no finit server holding it.
One limitation, and it matters: no app can recover what Apple already deleted. A record can only begin where the rolling window still reaches, about four weeks back. The best day to start a permanent one is, unavoidably, today; every week you wait is a week the tape erases.
Does Screen Time history transfer to a new iPhone?#
Your Screen Time settings (limits, downtime, restrictions) travel with your account. The usage history itself is best treated as a resident of the old phone: whatever fragments survive a migration, nothing on any Apple surface will show you past the four-week wall anyway. If the history matters to you, it needs to live outside Screen Time before you switch devices.
The short answers#
How long does Screen Time history last?
About four weeks, as a rolling window: each new day pushes the oldest one off the edge. No setting extends it.
Can you recover Screen Time data the iPhone already deleted?
No. Once a day has left the window it is gone from the device, and it is not waiting in a backup either. A record can only be built forward, from days the window still holds.
Does iCloud keep Screen Time history longer?
No. Share Across Devices merges your devices into one chart; it does not lengthen the window. Every device forgets on the same schedule.
How do you see Screen Time from months or years ago?
Only by keeping a copy before it expires. That is what finit is for: it files each day into a permanent record on your iPhone, and the months add up from there.
Four weeks of memory, for a thing most of us do four hours a day. That mismatch is the reason finit exists. And if you're deciding how to deal with the hours themselves, we've also written honestly about whether app blockers actually work and which ones to pick.
