great in concept, much less so in practice – Freedom - Reduce Distractions Review

I find this app to be very frustrating to use for several reasons. First, echoing another reviewer above, initially this app worked like a charm across all my devices (2 Apple and 2 Windows), but after several months, some functionality stopped working. For example, it no longer blocks Instagram at all. I contacted tech support and they have always been very responsive, but their suggestions are often to do really obvious things like uninstall/reinstall, or delete sessions, blocklists or media and then re-add. At one point, Firefox would not block any websites at all, and after I emailed them they apologized for the inconvenience, were aware of the problem, and then sent me a new version with a fancy App Blocking feature. Here, I could just choose to NOT use Firefox, which seemed unideal, but I went along with it. I did this, and it worked for a little while, but after several months, it stopped working altogether. So now I have an app-blocking setting to Firefox but Firefox still launches and browsers where I want to go. My finally complaint is the interface itself. I have a Regular Session to block out 5 days from social media and news sites, but trying to edit this is unintuitive and sometimes does not work. Sometimes I can click on my Regular Sessioin block and sometimes I cannot. There is no simple way to just edit it to how you want. So my conclusion is that I really want to like this program, which is great in concept but much less so in practice. It has proven time and again to be less useful, less reliable, and more and more frustrating to try to use. Hopefully they'll figure this out and it will work like a champ soon, because if not, I will likely not renew my yearly subscription to it.
Review by kip* on Freedom - Reduce Distractions.