Guide

How to block Chess.com on iPhone

Reading time: 7 minutes · Updated August 2026 · iOS 16 and later

There are five real ways to block chess on an iPhone. Four are built into iOS and free, and each has a specific weakness. Here they are in order of how much friction they actually create.

1. Screen Time app limits (free, built in)

Settings → Screen Time → App Limits → Add Limit. Pick Games, or tap a category and select Chess.com specifically. Set a daily allowance.

Weakness: the limit is measured in minutes of app time, and when it runs out iOS offers "Ignore Limit → Ignore For Today". One tap. If you set a passcode it is harder, but you chose the passcode, so you know it. This stops absent-minded opening; it does not stop a determined binge.

2. Downtime (free, built in)

Settings → Screen Time → Downtime. Schedule the hours when only allowed apps work. This is the strongest free option for the specific problem of late-night chess, because it fires on a clock rather than on your judgement.

Weakness: it is all-or-nothing across a window, so you will end up allow-listing apps and gradually widening the window. And it still offers the one-tap bypass.

3. Content restrictions to block the website (free, built in)

Blocking the app is pointless if Safari still works. Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → Content Restrictions → Web Content → Limit Adult Websites, then add chess.com and lichess.org under NEVER ALLOW.

Weakness: it only covers Safari properly. Other browsers, and in-app browsers inside other apps, can leak through. This is the step most people skip, and it is why "I blocked the app and still played six games" is such a common complaint.

4. Delete the app (free, immediate, temporary)

Genuinely effective as a circuit-breaker, and worth doing tonight if tonight is bad. One player put the case for it well:

Blocking myself from the website helped deal with habitually opening the site whenever I felt bored, so I would try uninstalling first, just to add a bit of resistance. — Hacker News

Weakness: reinstalling takes twenty seconds and your account is waiting. It buys you an evening, not a habit.

5. A third-party blocker (paid, strongest)

Apps built on Apple's Family Controls framework enforce blocks below the app layer, which is why they hold where a self-imposed rule does not. What separates the good ones from the rest is not the blocking — they all use the same Apple API — it is what triggers the block and how hard it is to undo.

Two things to check before paying for any of them:

• Does it measure the thing you actually care about? Most blockers estimate time-in-app, and users regularly report being locked out for time they never spent. For chess there is a far better signal: games finished, which is a fact rather than an estimate.
• Can you undo it in the moment? If loosening your own limit takes effect immediately, the block is decorative. The setting that matters is whether a change applies now or tomorrow.

What does not work

• Closing your Chess.com or Lichess account. New accounts take a minute. Players in these forums report recreating within the hour.
• VPN-based blockers. They break other things, and iOS makes them easy to switch off.
• Asking a friend to hold your password. Better than nothing, but you can reset a password by email, and most people give up on asking after the second time.

The honest recommendation

Stack them. Downtime for the hours you never want to play, web content restrictions so the browser is not a back door, and something with a real trigger and a real delay for the daily limit. Free options are genuinely good at removing absent-minded opening. They are weak at exactly one thing: the moment after a loss when you want one more game. That moment is worth spending money on, because it is the moment the rest of the evening is decided.