What happens when you miss a signal

The consequence, in order.

The lock

The moment your response window closes without the right code, NoOut locks the apps you staked — enforced through Apple's Screen Time APIs, not a notification you can dismiss. There's nothing to swipe away.

The escalation ladder

A first miss locks your staked apps for 12 hours, and locks your account until you protect new apps — do that and you're straight back in, even while the old apps keep counting down on their own. Miss again immediately after, and the apps lock for 24 hours, same account-unlock deal. A third consecutive miss locks the apps for 48 hours and locks the account behind a paywall — no recommitting your way out this time, only paying resets the ladder back to the start. A single successful response at any point resets it too.

Solo and Global share the consequence

If you're playing both modes, they share one stake — so a miss in either one locks your apps in both, even though only one of them actually had a signal expire. Your streak and history still track each mode separately; only the lock itself is shared. See Solo vs Global for why.

Getting back in: the re-commitment gate

Once your lock expires, NoOut doesn't just start sending signals again automatically. No new signal is scheduled until you've staked more apps than you had at the exact moment you missed. It's a deliberate gate, not a bug — the price of continuing is raising the stakes, not just waiting out the clock.

Opting out doesn't waive it

Leaving a mode is queued, not instant: it keeps running until its next signal resolves, win or lose. If that last signal is a miss, the usual consequence still applies in full — opting out was never meant to be a way to dodge a loss you saw coming.