Turn on phone usage context

Android only, and only from Settings

Phone usage context exists on Android and nowhere else. There is no iPhone equivalent — iOS gives an app no comparable read of how long the phone was in use — and the browser has none either. If you are reading this on the public help centre, everything below describes the Android app.

Usage access is a special access, not an ordinary permission. Android never shows an in-app request for it, so there is no Allow button inside Achetrace and nothing to answer. The one route is Android's own screen: Settings ▸ Special app access ▸ Usage access, then Achetrace. On the Connections card, the Phone usage row's Connect button starts the walk there, and it is two taps inside the app before Android's screen appears: an explanation of what the access is for, with an Open Usage Access settings button, and then a second panel headed Allow Usage Access whose Open Usage Access button is the one that actually hands you over. Reaching that second panel is the flow working, not a tap that failed.

Coming back is what completes it. When you return to Achetrace, the app re-reads the setting rather than trusting what it knew before you left, and if usage access is now on it imports that day's summary on the spot. The row then reads On ✓ and keeps an Import button, which runs the same import again whenever you tap it.

One consequence is worth knowing before you go looking for a request you were never shown: the app reads this setting as allowed or not allowed, and nothing finer. Never switched on, switched off, and held off by someone else are the same answer from here, so neither the row nor this page can tell you which happened, and neither pretends to.

What Achetrace derives, and what it never records

An import reads that day's app foreground and background events once and turns them into one derived summary for that day. There is no background job and no daily repeat. Three things run it, and every one of them is a tap of yours: coming back from Settings having switched the access on; the Import button the Phone usage row keeps once it is on; and the Connect phone usage button under Permissions on the Privacy page, which imports straight away when the access is already on rather than walking you to Settings again. Nothing schedules it. The summary holds:

• active minutes;
• the longest unbroken session;
• how many sessions there were;
• how many breaks of five minutes or more fell between them;
• late-night active minutes, counted before 06:00 and after 22:00 in your device's own time zone.

Alongside those it records a single bucket of time called phone active, and a flag recording that no window titles were captured.

No app names reach that summary. The package names the events carry are used to pair an app coming to the foreground with the same app going to the background, and are dropped in the same step that produces the totals. Window titles, URLs, message content and notification text are never read at all.

Where this shows up on the phone is narrower than the list above, but it is more than one screen. Four places read from it:

• on Timeline, the end-of-day report adds a line reading "About … active desk minutes today.";
• on Timeline again, the day gets an Android Usage entry reading "… active min, … breaks taken, … movement-verified" — or "movement verification unavailable" in place of that last figure, which is what it says today, because nothing yet checks a break against movement. The two are different quantities: "breaks taken" counts idle gaps in phone use, and the movement-verified figure counts only those with movement evidence behind them. Look for it one heading earlier than you expect if you are west of UTC: an entry is filed at midnight UTC rather than at midnight where you are, and Timeline groups entries by your device's own time zone, so in the Americas it sits under the heading for the day before the one it summarises. At UTC and east of it, it sits under that day's own heading;
• on Trends, the Usage days count on the Outcomes & experiment card;
• on Review, while no experiment of yours is running, the Suggested experiment — "Try one trackable break plan after sessions over … -minute blocks."

What each of those figures counts is not described here. The four read the stored summaries in different ways — some take every record, some take one, and which records exist depends on what synced and when — so a short rule about any of them is wrong for at least one of the others. If a number on one of those screens does not look like the day you had, Why the totals may look wrong below covers what the summary itself includes, which is the part that is the same everywhere.

The session count and the late-night minutes are the parts nothing shows. They are derived, stored and uploaded like the rest, and there is no screen in the Android app that reads them back to you.

What is uploaded, and what stays on the phone

What stays on the phone and what is uploaded are not the same list. Everything above is stored on the device. When you are signed in, what goes to your account is narrower in one way and wider in another:

• uploaded: the day it covers, active minutes, the longest unbroken session, the session count, both break counts, and late-night active minutes — plus the platform name and a device type of "android phone", so your account can tell what KIND of device a day came from. Nothing identifies the handset itself: two Android phones on one account upload the same platform and device type, so the account cannot tell their days apart;
• kept on the phone: the phone active bucket and the no window titles were captured flag. Neither is part of the upload.

Nothing is derived while access is off. With the setting off the app reads nothing and stores no summary. Only the current day is ever summarised, so an import covers that day from its start and leaves the days before it alone; earlier days are never filled in afterwards.

Why the totals may look wrong

A session is time an app spent in the foreground, not time you were looking. A video left playing in the foreground counts; reading something on paper beside an unlocked phone counts too.

It is not device screen-on time, and it can exceed it. Active minutes are the sum of each app's foreground intervals, so where Android runs two apps at once — split screen, or a video in picture-in-picture over something else — both intervals are counted and the day's total can come out higher than the time the screen was actually on. Read the number as attention spread across apps rather than as a clock on the display.

An app still open when the summary is built is counted to the end of the day. The import summarises the day it runs on, and anything still in the foreground at that moment has its session closed off at the coming midnight rather than at the moment you looked. So a summary taken at lunchtime with a video still playing can include hours that have not happened yet, and nothing revises it on its own. Tapping Import again later the same day re-derives the day from scratch and replaces the figure on the phone, so a projection can be corrected. A session genuinely running at midnight is closed there in the same way, rather than being carried into the following day.

The day is bounded in the device's time zone as it stands at the import. Active minutes are counted between that day's start and end in the zone the phone is set to when the summary is taken, so minutes either side of a zone change are not guaranteed to be conserved; a daylight-saving day is not 24 hours either.

When you would rather not turn it on

Not turning it on is a supported way to use Achetrace, not an unfinished setup step. Pain episodes, posture, notes and goals are entered and read without it, and the Phone usage row keeps offering the setting rather than treating it as owed.

Two things cover most of what it would have given you:

• Write it down. If a day felt heavy on the phone, say so in that day's notes. It is free text rather than a measured total, and the app treats it as such.
• Pair the desktop companion. Computer usage reaches your account from the macOS or Windows companion, in the same derived shape and in the same insight windows, and it is a separate connection that does not depend on this one.

You can switch usage access off again at any time from the same Settings screen. With it off nothing further is read; it does not remove a summary already recorded, and deleting that is part of Export or delete your data.