Short answer: touch and hold the app’s icon on the Home Screen, tap Require Face ID, then confirm Require Face ID. The app now needs your face (or Touch ID, or your passcode) every time it opens. The same menu offers Hide and Require Face ID, which also removes the app from the Home Screen and tucks it into a locked folder in App Library. Both need iOS 18 or later.
Two taps, no third-party app. What takes longer is knowing which problem it solves — because there are two very different reasons people search for this, and only one of them is answered by Face ID.
Lock an app behind Face ID
- Find the app on your Home Screen or in App Library.
- Touch and hold its icon until the menu appears.
- Tap Require Face ID (on an iPhone with Touch ID it reads Require Touch ID).
- Tap Require Face ID again to confirm.
Open the app now and it asks to authenticate first. To undo it, touch and hold the icon again and choose Don’t Require Face ID — that also asks for authentication, so nobody can quietly switch it off while holding your unlocked phone.
Apple also keeps a locked app’s content out of places it would otherwise leak: Search, Siri suggestions, and notification previews.
Hide the app instead
From the same touch-and-hold menu, Hide and Require Face ID does everything above and moves the app out of the Home Screen into a Hidden folder at the bottom of App Library, which itself opens only with Face ID.
Worth knowing before you rely on it:
- Hidden apps don’t show notifications or badges, so anything time-sensitive should not be hidden.
- Not every app can be hidden — Apple excludes some system apps, and an app has to be installed from the App Store.
- The app is hidden, not deleted. Its data and its subscription are untouched.
What the Face ID lock actually protects
It protects the app from someone else — the person handed your unlocked phone to look at a photo, the colleague who picks it up off the desk, the moment you pass it to a child. For that job it is excellent, and it’s the reason the feature exists.
It does almost nothing to protect you from yourself. Your face is already pointed at the screen. A Face ID prompt adds roughly half a second to opening Instagram, which is not friction — it’s a speed bump you stop noticing by the third day.
If you came here to stop your own late-night scrolling, the Face ID lock is the wrong tool. Keep reading.
Locking an app from yourself: the Screen Time route
Apple’s real mechanism for this is Screen Time, and it works like this:
- Settings → Screen Time → App & Website Activity → App Limits → Add Limit, choose the app, set 1 minute. (On iOS 18–25, App Limits sits directly under Screen Time — there’s no App & Website Activity step.)
- Turn on Block at End of Limit, then tap Add.
- Settings → Screen Time → Lock Screen Time Settings and set a passcode that isn’t your unlock code.
Now the app stops opening after its first minute of the day, and getting past it means leaving the app, opening Settings, and typing a passcode. The full walk-through of every blocking option is here.
Two honest limits. First, you know the passcode — this makes a block deliberate, not impossible. The strongest version is a passcode set by someone else, which not everyone wants. Second, it’s one strength for everything: strict enough to keep you out of TikTok is also strict enough to lock the messaging app your work runs on, so most people end up setting it loose enough to do nothing.
Lock, hide, or block — which one you want
| Your actual goal | The feature |
|---|---|
| Someone else must not open this app | Require Face ID |
| Someone else must not even see this app | Hide and Require Face ID |
| I must not open this app for most of the day | App Limit + Block at End of Limit |
| Nothing on the phone until morning | Downtime + Block At Downtime |
| Different strength for different apps | Not something iOS does on its own |
That last row is the gap. iOS gives you one dial for everything you block, and your phone isn’t one habit — Instagram at midnight and the work chat at midday are not the same problem and don’t deserve the same answer.
That’s the gap Daily Offline is built for: every app sits on one of three rungs — Block (one tap to turn off, and we say so), Earn (ten minutes for a breath, a written reason, or 100 steps), or Lock (nothing to earn; turning it off costs a twenty-minute wait). It also counts something iOS never shows you: how many times you reached for an app, and how many times you turned around.
Quick answers
Can I lock apps on iPhone without Face ID? Yes. On a Touch ID iPhone the menu reads Require Touch ID, and either way your device passcode works as the fallback when biometrics fail.
Which iOS version do I need? iOS 18 or later for locking and hiding apps from the Home Screen. Screen Time limits work on much older versions.
Does locking an app hide its notifications? Locking alone keeps the app’s content out of Search, Siri suggestions and notification previews. Hiding an app stops its notifications altogether.
Can someone delete a locked app to get around it? Removing a locked app requires authentication too, so a passer-by with your unlocked phone can’t simply drag it off the Home Screen.
Will this reduce my screen time? Not on its own — it isn’t designed to. The wider set of settings that does is a better place to start, and if iOS isn’t enough, here’s how the third-party blockers compare.