Signal is worth being honest about upfront: it's the one app on this list that isn't trying to hold your attention. It's built by a nonprofit, funded to stay that way, carries no ads, and has no recommendation algorithm deciding what you see — by design, deliberately, as a matter of stated principle. If you're searching for how to block Signal, the app itself almost certainly isn't the problem. The people messaging you are, and that's a genuinely different thing to want help with.
What actually makes Signal hard to close
With no feed and no algorithm to blame, what's left is the same core obligation every messaging app runs on: unread messages from specific people, group chats that keep moving whether you're watching or not, and the quiet social pressure of being expected to reply. Signal's privacy-first design, ironically, can sharpen this slightly — disappearing messages and strict read-status settings mean some of the usual "I didn't see it yet" plausible deniability isn't available the way it might be elsewhere. Because the app has no distracting extras layered on top of messaging, checking it rarely turns into an accidental long session the way a feed-adjacent app might; the entire time cost here is just replying, or thinking about replying, to real conversations.
The built-in iPhone route, and where it gives way
An iOS Screen Time App Limit on Signal works the same as on any app: a warning, a lock screen, and a single "Ignore Limit for Today" button that clears it instantly, gated only by a Screen Time passcode you set and know yourself. Restricting an app that carries no engagement design at all feels like treating a symptom rather than a cause — the limit doesn't reduce how many people are messaging you or how urgent those messages feel, it just makes checking them mildly less convenient until you tap past it.
The built-in Android route, and where it gives way
Digital Wellbeing's App Timer greys out Signal's icon at your limit and offers more time the moment you tap it, adjustable or removable from Settings whenever you like. Same honest limitation: a generic timer manages time spent in an app, and here the app was never the thing engineering that time in the first place — the timer's real target, the underlying communication itself, is untouched by it either way.
What changes when the toll is three questions
Mr. Grummel's toll doesn't assume Signal is manipulating you, because it isn't — it just makes opening the app, for any reason, cost a few minutes of real thought first. That's still useful even against a purely social pull: a lot of message-checking happens reflexively, out of low-grade anxiety about what might be waiting, rather than because a reply is actually due right now. The toll doesn't need an algorithm to interrupt. It interrupts the reflex itself, whether an app engineered that reflex or a group chat simply grew one on its own.
A realistic day
Right now: Signal buzzes, and even when nothing in it is actually urgent, checking happens immediately, dozens of times a day, out of habit more than necessity. With the toll in place: each open costs three questions first. Genuinely time-sensitive messages still get answered promptly — the toll was never trying to make you a worse correspondent. What changes is the reflexive, anxious checking in between, which now has to survive a few minutes of actual thinking before it happens.