Any way to get DeviceActivity programmatically in background?

[Jpoliachik]

I see you're currently getting iOS DeviceActivity data by rendering ActivityCategoryToken / ApplicationToken converting to image, and doing OCR to extract the text. This seems crazy to me - is there really no way to get this data from an Apple API?
I'd appreciate any insight you have. I'm trying to build an app that gets total pickup / screen time usage, and struggling with Apple's API. Curious to hear from you why the OCR solution is necessary.

[NoodleOfDeath]

unfortunately, no 😭 and it isnt really working 100% because Apple throttles the https requests. im impressed you could see my messy workaround. dont hesitate to improve it... it was like the only hack i could manage

[Jpoliachik]

I dug into this yesterday too, and found the same thing as you - no way to get the data programatically :( But rendering some of the data inside an iOS DeviceActivityReportExtension lets you generate a "report" to show some of the filtered screen time data. It's just heavily sandboxed so you wouldn't be able to send that data over the bridge to React Native.

I'm also just curious - have you shipped an app to the App Store or Testflight yet? People are saying that using OCR goes against Apple's terms, and could get the app blocked by review. Just a heads up - but I'm curious too.

[NoodleOfDeath]

OCR is not against Apple terms and conditions. It is a framework that Apple provides. I have utilized this for a word redaction feature in an app called Drunk Mode https://drunkmode.app