If you want the most established app, install Unchaind — it has 44,599 App Store ratings at 4.83 and another 53,595 on Google Play, more than anything else in this category. If you want one you can actually use before paying, install IronWill: it is the only app of the six where we could confirm that the blocker switches on without a purchase and without an account. Those are two different questions, and which one matters more depends on whether you want a community to belong to or a tool that works at 2am on the day you install it.

We make one of these apps, so read the rest with that in mind. What we can offer instead of impartiality is a table you can check yourself: every App Store figure below was read from Apple’s public listing data and every Google Play figure from the app’s own listing, both on 30 October 2026, and every capability was confirmed by someone here opening the app on 15 September 2026. Where nobody here has verified something, it says so rather than guessing.

One of the six is now five. QUITTR’s App Store listing no longer resolves — Apple’s lookup API returned nothing for it in six storefronts and the page 404s — and separately, 404 Media reported that a misconfigured Firebase database had left intimate user data from the app readable, with Cybernews putting the scale at around 600,000 users. Nothing published connects those two facts and we are not going to connect them for you; a withdrawal, a move or an acquisition would look the same from outside. It stays in the table, with the figures it had when we could still read them, because people are still searching for it.

The six apps

App	App Store	Google Play	Minimum iOS	Seller
Unchaind	4.83 from 44,599	4.6 from 53,595	16.4	Rocapine
QUITTR	Listing removed — 4.72 from 33,496 on 16 Sep 2026	No listing found	17.0	Quittr, LLC
Brainbuddy	4.68 from 26,021	4.6 from 22,922	13.0	AppStudio Australia Pty Ltd
Seed	4.66 from 6,499	Not verified	17.0	Nora Studios Inc
BlockerX	4.40 from 8,353	4.4 from 220,599	15.0	Atmana Tech - FZCO
IronWill	5.0 from 4	4.9 from 629	16.6	CoolCool Studio

Seed’s Play cell is blank for a reason worth stating: there is a “Seed: Gamify No Nut Quit Porn” on Play, but its developer line reads “Quiet Games.” where the App Store listing says Nora Studios Inc. Same concept, unmatched publisher, so we are not going to claim one company behind two names.

Read that last row honestly. Four App Store ratings is not a track record, and a 5.0 average across four of them tells you nothing that 4.83 across forty-four thousand does not tell you better. Our 629 Play reviews are a real number but still a small one next to Unchaind’s fifty-three thousand. If longevity is your criterion, this comparison is already over and the answer is Unchaind.

All six are free to download with paid upgrades. The differences that matter are not in the price tag; they are in what happens before you reach it.

The question almost nobody asks first: can it block anything without paying?

Most of these apps describe themselves as blockers. Five of the six do contain a blocker — QUITTR, Seed, Brainbuddy, BlockerX and IronWill all have one; we have not verified whether Unchaind does.

But a blocker you cannot switch on is a screenshot. When we checked inside the apps on 15 September 2026:

QUITTR — blocker present, not usable without paying.
Seed — blocker present, not usable without paying.
Brainbuddy — blocker present, not usable without paying.
BlockerX — blocker present; whether it works unpaid, we have not verified.
Unchaind — not verified.
IronWill — blocker present, and since October 2026 not usable without paying either.

When this page was first published IronWill was the exception here: its blocker ran on a three-day trial unlocked by watching an ad. That is gone, and we have changed the row rather than leave ourselves at the top of a list we have fallen off. So the honest answer to the question in the heading is that none of the four apps we could verify will block anything before you pay. The day you go looking for one of these apps is usually not the day you want to enter card details, and every one of them will ask you to — which is invisible from the store listing, and worth knowing before you install one expecting otherwise.

The second question: does it need your email?

Of the apps we could verify, QUITTR, Seed and Brainbuddy all require an account; IronWill does not. Unchaind and BlockerX we have not verified.

This is not a small preference. The data these apps hold — what you logged, when you relapsed, what triggered it — is the most sensitive category of thing on your phone. An app with no account has no profile to breach and nothing to attach a subpoena to. IronWill keeps streaks, check-ins and journal entries on the device, and the website filter decides what to block locally, so browsing is never uploaded. What does leave the phone is ordinary plumbing: anonymous crash and usage reporting, ad requests on the free tier, and the text of an AI coach conversation, which has to reach Google to produce a reply.

Where each one is actually strongest

Unchaind — the highest-rated app in the category and the largest. If what you want is the app the most people have stuck with, this is the evidence-backed answer. We have not verified its feature set, so we will not characterise it beyond what its store listing shows.

QUITTR — 33,496 ratings when we last read the listing, and a community feed inside the app. If part of what keeps you going is other people being visibly in it with you, that matters, and QUITTR has it where IronWill does not. You cannot currently install it from the App Store, though: see the note above the table.

Brainbuddy — the oldest app here by a wide margin, supporting iOS 13. If you are running an old device, it may be the only one on this list that installs.

Seed — a smaller, newer app with a gamified 3D-orb progression, an AI coach and a community feed. The most visually distinctive of the six.

BlockerX — the only app here filed under Productivity rather than Health & Fitness first, and the one that positions itself as a blocker before it positions itself as a recovery tracker. If blocking is the entire reason you are looking, it is the one built around that premise.

IronWill — the one app here that asks for no account and no email at all; the AI coach is free for your first day; and it counts urges you resisted as a tally that does not reset when you relapse, which is the number most people need on the worst day. Its blocker is behind Pro, like everyone else’s. It is also, by a distance, the least proven app on this page.

What no app on this list can do

None of them can block porn absolutely. On a phone, a determined person can uninstall the app, pick up another device, or reset the handset. Any app marketing itself as unbypassable is overselling, and the honest version of the claim is narrower and still worth something: a blocker removes the ten-second decision between an urge and an open tab, which is where most relapses actually happen. There is more on exactly how that works on each platform in how the porn blocker works on iPhone and Android.

None of them can tell you whether you have a problem, either. Grubbs and colleagues (2015) found that whether someone considers themselves addicted to porn tracks their moral disapproval of their own use at least as strongly as it tracks how much they actually use — two people with identical habits can be in entirely different situations. A day counter cannot make that distinction and neither can a paywall.

And none of them are treatment. If porn use is damaging your relationships, your work or your mental health, the useful step is a professional, not a better app.

So which one

Most proven: Unchaind, on ratings volume and average.
Biggest in-app community: QUITTR.
Oldest device support: Brainbuddy, at iOS 13.
Usable before you pay, no account: IronWill.

If you want to know where you are starting from before installing anything, the free porn addiction test is an eighteen-question scale adapted from published research, scored on your device and sent nowhere. And if you are wondering how long any of this takes, the honest answer is in how long does it take to recover — nobody knows, and the apps quoting you a number are guessing.

The full side-by-side table, including the rows where we have verified nothing, is on the comparison page. If something there is wrong, please tell us and we will correct it.

The best apps to quit porn, compared honestly