Schedules: locks that fire without you

A decision made once, on Sunday, is made by a version of you with the whole week in view. A decision made at 11 p.m. on Wednesday is made by somebody tired who has a reason. Schedules exist so the second person does not get a vote.

Two kinds

• <b>Recurring.</b> Pick the weekdays and a start and end time — 7 to 9 every weekday evening, or 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. every night. It repeats until you change it.
• <b>One-off.</b> A single dated window, for the day before a paper or an afternoon you need to finish something. It runs once and does not come back.

Why it survives a killed app

The schedule is handed to the operating system: Android's alarm manager on one side, Apple's DeviceActivity on the other. That matters more than it sounds. A blocker that relies on its own app being alive is a blocker that quietly stops working the first time Android's battery manager decides to clean up — which is precisely when a phone-heavy evening is happening.

The same goes for a reboot: the schedule is re-registered when the phone starts up, so a restart is not a way out. Clock changes are handled properly too — a window set for 7 p.m. is 7 p.m. after the clocks move, not 6 or 8.

The warning before it starts

A lock that lands with no notice feels like the phone breaking. Spark sends a short warning before a scheduled window opens, so you can finish the message you were typing rather than discover mid-sentence that the app is gone.

The honest limits

• A scheduled session ends like any other: early, by fetching the key; or on time, by itself. The schedule decides when it starts, not that it can never end.
• Two schedules that overlap do not stack — one session runs at a time.
• Android's battery settings can still interfere on some manufacturers' phones. The app checks for that and tells you when a permission has been withdrawn, rather than failing silently.