RescueTime Reviews

I like the desktop this app application but RescueTime for the phone does not work very well. It doesn’t tell you anything about which apps are using time and it requires GPS data so that it can tell you where you pick the phone up which I do not care about and would rather it did not force me to have to enable. It is also wildly inaccurate when it comes to the amount of time the phone has been used. Apple’s Screen Time shows I’ve used my phone for one hour today where as this app says I’ve only used it for 19 minutes - totally wrong.

I might be biased but I’ve been using this app since 2008 to keep a healthy work pace, focus better, avoid distractions, and know when to stop working too much. I really think of it like a sleep tracker or a mindfulness meter and it keeps me on track- especially working remote / from home.

So far I’ve used RescueTime for around a month and it does a good job in allowing me to track my hours on my desktop/laptop. However, with this recent update that allows “device tracking”, it isn’t what I thought it would be like. For some reason you must have location tracking on at all times in order to track your time. Also, it can’t even do that correctly. When I checked my phone at the end of the day it said I had no time on my device which was definitely wrong as shown on my apple screen time. Even then, there is no option so far to categorize the time on my phone. Right now, this new feature doesn’t add anything, but for tracking time on desktop it’s fine.

This would be great if it worked even half as well as the iOS screen time feature. It barely keeps track of any usage and is a big flaw in Rescue Time’s automatic tracking claim.

RescueTime does nothing for IOS devices.

No recorded usage on either my iPad or phone yet I have used both after installing RescueTime .

Seems RescueTime was made as an afterthought to the desktop program. It is really pretty useless.

I love the desktop app, but the iOS app won’t even open.

I DO NOT get why they feel the need to track my location at all times, just to track what apps I'm using on my phone.??? I tried it for 2 days and it just drained my battery nonstop. You guys need to fix this. You don't need to know where I am at every moment of the day. That needs to be an OPTION, that most people wouldn't want anyway. Trash app, don't use this until they get it together.

In the F.A.Q. of RescueTime you’ll read the limitations that iPhone has for developers. They did all they can. It takes your daily reflection of 10 minutes or so to categorize stuff. I’m not familiar with a better alternative. Any problems about lost time is from force closing RescueTime . This and screen time with location points to know what I was doing. I can always go into my own browser history to meticulously sort tasks I did.

First of all I must say this app increased my productivity by a huge margin and helps me stick to my goals.
I downloaded the mobile app so I could see my desktop usage on the go but was a bit disappointed since it allows no date filtering or goal setting from RescueTime , I wish RescueTime would let me see everything just like the website.
Hope it gets added soon!
Keep it up!

Deleting until they can provide a breakdown of app usage. The big draw for Rescue Time is logging productive/unproductive time during the work day. But RescueTime can’t tell you the difference between Facebook hours and reprint reading hours.

Also, despite their claims, I can see absolutely no need for RescueTime to have to track my location. I don’t care where I am or how many “pick ups” I have. Just tell me the apps I use and if the time spent on the device is productive or not.

The computer app is great on Macs. This mobile app is useless in its current state.

I love using my desktop this app, but...
1- The iOS app doesn’t count time correctly.
2- There should be a separation between tablet and phone. A lot of people use the iPad as a productivity device, so to me it doesn’t make sense to put my iPhone and iPad time together.

Thanks for the hardwork for making RescueTime available. So far it's good out of the box. But someway somehow my mobile time always show as 0h|0m. Not really a problem to me since I mostly work with my Mac,but it would nice if the mobile time is accurate

Being able to see my computer usage on ios is convenient, and I'm grateful for the automatic mobile tracking. It tracks while I have GPS going for navigation, so I need to do some editing after, but it's better than not having tracking. Thank you for building RescueTime ! 👍

I agree with a lot of the users regarding location service. RescueTime forces you to turn on location service for it to track your activities when there’s no actual need for it. Why on earth does RescueTime need to know where I am when all I want to know is how much I spend on each app? I feel violated by this setting. The desktop/Internet free version, on the other hand, has been good so far.

I’m using this app for a clinical study I’m participating in, but not a fan of it at all. I don’t like that as soon as you force close RescueTime , it notifies you to basically open it back up or it won’t work. I have RescueTime consistently in the background, but if I look back on previous days, it has nothing uploaded. I also get emails from this app saying that I haven’t recorded any time this week so they can’t give me my weekly summary. It gives me 3 options as to why it’s not running:
1. The this app application isn’t running.
2. You're using a computer without this app installed on it.
3. You uninstalled this app from your computer.

Not a very smart application in my opinion and will be installing it after this study is over.

Q: What benefit do I get from RescueTime?
A: I get an inaccurate list of the times I picked up my iphone or iPad. This list is automatically sent to my this app account, where I can do little with it. I can't enter non-desktop time with it. The best I can do is—on my desktop—use the times I picked up one of my iDevices as a guide to entering offline time into this app.

Q: What is the cost of RescueTime?
A: In dollars, it's free with my this app account. The cost lies in its near-constant battery drain. I thought my iPhone battery was failing! No, it's just this app constantly querying my location to see if the phone's been picked up.

I'd rather have a little app that just lets me enter offline time for this app.

App does nothing that iOS built in “Screen Time” app does not do and this app does not even match Screen Time. ScreenTime says I used 2h 55m today and this app says 2h 30m. this app constantly uses 5% of my daily battery life too according to my battery usage from the last 10 days. Yes I understand location services is the only way to measure this but this price of 5% is too high for the benefit. Optimize it more. Uninstalling.

I’ve been using ResuceTime for years. I’ve loved being able to look at my productivity and understand my desktop screen time. But I have been wishing for a while that there was a way to integrate my mobile screen usage into the report. That is what RescueTime does. It combines the total screen time of mobile and desktop to give you a report of your combined screen time. That’s awesome!

BUT- it just shows you the overall screen time for mobile. It doesn’t show you what apps you were in, what category they are (like productive, unproductive) and how much time was spent in app. It just lumps it into the desktop report as iOS screen time. That is missing out on a HUGE amount of data which is the only reason I gave this 3 stars and not 5. I do love that it combines the report because I think that makes sense- we spend so much time on our screens but before there’s been no way to see and monitor both mobile and desktop combined (at least to my knowledge). Currently, the lack of data can be substituted with iOS 12 screen time feature, which gives you a great breakdown of your screen time, but Apple doesn’t allow you to alter any category of apps, which is really disappointing. (Example: Chrome is considered productive. But that’s not the way I use it, lol!)

I’m hoping RescueTime gets expanded on because it does help- I just want to see what apps I’m in, how long and what category they are, with the ability to edit their category, to better understand my total screen usage in depth. Because I spend almost as much time on my phone as I do on my desktop. It’s very important that the mobile details are not glossed over if ResuceTime really wants to be powerful and impactful as they can be for understanding screen usage in our lives.

If they don’t expand on the data on mobile and Apple expands to monitoring screen time on desktop to combine with their mobile screen tracking, ResuceTime will become obsolete to me. Just sayin.

After using RescueTime, the new iOS feature screentime stopped working. I was losing all my tracked Time on the iPhone in few hours. If you encounter a similar problem please report it for it to be fixed.
Also RescueTime is so limited but that's because of what iPhone allows to be tracked. Devs can't really do anything about that, at least for the current iOS.