Ochi Reviews

The this app app works great until it doesn’t. For some reason, my scheduled blocks (which I’m paying to use) don’t activate my filter. I have to, during the block, click view and then save, and accept to run a filter that’s scheduled to begin now. It is extremely annoying to have to manually activate every scheduled block, as that is the entire purpose of the feature in the first place.

I love Ochi and have been using it for some time now. However, when Ochi started automatically deleting my filters for some strange reason, I sent out three emails for technical support and received no response. I was quite disappointed considering how much I benefited from Ochi , but the owner/creator seems incapable of or unwilling to assist his customers. Again, disappointing :(

As a longtime Freedom user I've been dissapointed with that app's lack of new features, especially the lack of support for Shortcuts, so I was really intrigued when I read about Ochi on 9to5Mac. Unfortunately, it just reallly doesn't feel ready for primetime yet. In my experience so far on an M1 Mac, Ochi has been pretty much unusable, with lots of beach wheels and complete unresponsiveness. Even worse, when I tried to set up a filter with specific apps blocked, it ended up blocking apps I had NOT selected, ones that were CRUCIAL to my workflow. It was a huge waste of time and really frustrating. I had to force quit it with the activity monitor, and I'll be putting it away for now until these bugs get addressed.

Great concept, but execution is just not there yet.

Its buggy and has inconcistent behavior on mac, often crashes and doesnt actually block the sites. On iOS there are some hoops to get it to work, and im not sure how I feel giving access to all website data in order for the blocker to work, although I understand as a developer that may be unavoidable.

Hope you get these things sorted! having a native blocker like this would be ideal, it just needs more time in the oven.

Followed the directions for blocking an app. It only partially worked, and I could never get it to block one app. As part of trouble-shooting I tried to disable the filter and it told me I had to pay.

I had higher hopes for this, but it didn’t give me high confidence I could get it to work for me. It was already too much manual in setting up automations to get Ochi to only kind do work, so why would I pay?

I blocked some specific websites but all you have to do to bypass it is hit the back button and that’s it.

Only saying so this can be fixed and Ochi can improve

When I set up a filter, it always asks what app I am using before blocking. If I ignore the notification, it doesn’t block Ochi . Note, I have turned off the ask before running option so that isn’t the issue. Any suggestions?

Trying to add a website to block but after filling in the information the “add” button is grayed out. I’ve messed around with it for a bit and finally got it to work with random websites, but something is definitely broken. For instance, typing in “hhhhhhhhh.com” works, but not “Twitter.com”.

Edit: thanks for the quick response!

Apple’s time limit was so easy to bypass. this app is 1000x better and actually helped me with closing apps and blocking sites whenever I tried to use them. 5/5

I love the customizability of Ochi, and the ability to integrate with shortcuts. It’s the best out there for automating your focus for different types of tasks.

You gotta hand it to ‘em. It does what it says! The pro option ain’t cheap, but the free version has more than enough for 99% of folks.

Really good. It has the blocking option for every app and website and it doesn’t get disabled until I disable it.

I have been looking for a blocker for both apps and websites while I am at work. After quite some research, I settled on this app, which is really easy to set up and works on both macOS and iOS. this app has all the modern perks of a native Apple app, supporting Shortcuts and iCloud syncing among other things. The developer is very responsive to support questions. The free version is beyond generous, offering a single filter that can be configured to block an unlimited number of apps and websites together.

The only major limitation on macOS so far is that website blocking does not work on Firefox (for which I use LeechBlock, an open-source extension). Web blocking works very well on Safari and Chrome-based browsers. On iOS there are more system limitations, but this app has managed to accomplish a lot within these limits. It is particularly clever to use the Focus mode for macOS control of this app filters across Apple devices.

I wanted something simple that could block certain sites and it Ochi does just that. With ease. No hoops to jump through or requests to pay or add services. Grateful!

I’ve tried out a few other apps for content blocking/self control and this one’s the best I’ve found. Integration with the shortcuts app allows you to automate your settings (I linked the ‘suspend’ option with an NFC device). The only changes I’d request are to be able to block all apps instead of a predetermined list (the most common and distracting ones are on there but there are still a few I’d like to block, like the apple news app), and the ability to block websites on other browsers like chrome (I had to switch to using safari when I downloaded Ochi ). But it keeps me off of distracting apps/sites like youtube/instagram, which is exactly what I wanted from it! Thank you

It always annoyed me in a focus mode that I could still open blocked apps. Now with this app I can finally block the apps! Only negative I can say is if you use the Siri app suggestions widget it does not work for some reason.

After figuring out how to set up the automation, this is a wonderful app to use, and, in conjunction with Screen Time, its helping me to break my addictive phone habits. Also, an idea I had was to integrate Ochi with whatever browser a user has, and enable the user to automatically add a website they’re on to a filter. Just a thought :)

I made several filters but if you do not expressly allow activity monitor, there is no way to stop the filter. I have been basically locked out of doing essential tasks because of improperly built filters. There should be some ability to edit filters regardless of filter use.

Additionally, if you start a filter but made an error and want to add an app to the filter, you cannot even if you force quit this app via activity monitor because, when you start this app up again, the filter does not reset after a force quit; the filter continues.

Note: After the latest update, I’ve updated my score to 5 stars. 🙃 The iOS 16 bug I experienced is fixed, it seems. 🎉

I loved Ochi at launch, so it’s a bummer to see that development has slowed down considerably (especially since Ochi uses a subscription model). Lately on iOS I’ve been able to bypass the filter by simply clicking “reopen site”, which normally would refresh the page but still ultimately lock me out of the site. Maybe this is a new issue to iOS 16. Given the feature set overlap with Focused Work, which seems to be updated more frequently than this app, I’ve got to wonder if Ochi shouldn’t just be folded into Focused Work.

So thankful for the genius implementation of this tool. Finally a cross device standardization of boundaries in this digital world. Thank you!