Schedules and day passes
Two mechanisms move apps in and out of the cage on their own: schedules, which recur, and day passes, which are one-off. A global pause stops everything for a quarter of an hour.
Schedules
A schedule is a recurring window during which a target is caged. Open the list from the overflow menu (⋮) on the app list ▸ Schedules, then New schedule.
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Applies to | Exactly one of A profile or A single app — never both, never neither |
| Start, End | Times of day, in the device's local time |
| Days | Which days of the week the window starts on |
| Enabled | Turn a schedule off without deleting it |
The editor tells you what it has understood:
- Overnight — the end time is at or before the start time, so the window runs into the next day.
- Runs all day — start and end are the same, so the window covers the whole day.
Validation happens at the field: Choose a profile or an app, Choose at least one day.
How schedules combine
Schedules union together and never cancel one another out. Two overlapping windows on the same app keep it caged for the whole of both; neither one releases it.
A schedule also never touches your manual selection. An app you caged by hand stays caged when a schedule's window closes — the schedule only ever adds while it is open. An app contributed by a schedule that has no rule of its own is treated as blocked on both transports, the same default a fresh manual cage gets.
Overnight windows
An overnight window is anchored to the day it starts. A Friday 22:00–06:00 window is still the Friday schedule at 02:00 on Saturday, so Saturday not being one of its days does not close it early.
Daylight saving
Windows are evaluated as instants, not as wall-clock comparisons, so the two days a year the clock is not monotonic resolve unambiguously:
- A window that opens inside a skipped hour (spring forward) opens as soon as time resumes.
- A window that spans a repeated hour (autumn fall-back) covers the whole of it — its start uses the earlier occurrence and its end the later one.
What happens at a boundary
At a start boundary the target's apps join the caged set; at an end boundary they leave it. Either way NetCage recomputes the whole set and re-establishes the tunnel in place. The service is not restarted, and apps that were already caged are not disturbed.
The boundary itself is scheduled as an alarm. With Precise timing granted (see Install and setup) it fires at the exact minute, even while the phone is asleep. Without it, a background-work fallback runs the same recomputation, which can be a little late but never wrong: the decision is always made from the clock at the moment it runs, never from what was expected earlier.
Only the single earliest deadline is ever scheduled at once, and it is re-armed after each one, so a phone with many schedules does not wake up repeatedly.
Deadlines are also honoured while the phone is still locked after a reboot.
Day passes
A day pass lets one caged app back online for a set time, after which it re-cages itself with no further action from you.
Open the app's detail view and use the Day pass row:
- Presets: 5m, 15m, 1h.
- Custom — any value from 1 to 720 minutes.
The app must be caged first. If it is not, the buttons are disabled and the row says so: Cage this app first — a pass interrupts caging.
While a pass is running, the app's row shows a Released for … pill, and the detail view reads Released for 12m · re-cages at 14:20 with a Cancel that ends the pass immediately.
Settings ▸ Behaviour ▸ Default day pass duration (5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes; 15 by default) is the value the Custom dialog opens with.
If every eligible app is on a day pass at once, the cage goes inactive until the first one expires — there is nothing left to route, and an empty allow-list is never established. See How it works.
The global pause
The cage notification carries a Pause 15m action. It suspends enforcement everywhere for fifteen minutes; the header reads Paused and names the time it resumes, and the notification offers Resume to end it early.
A pause leaves every selection, profile and schedule exactly as it is. So does turning the master switch off, which is the indefinite version of the same idea.
:::note Neither day passes nor the pause are part of your configuration Both are deadlines measured against a clock, so neither is exported, imported or synced. Restoring "released until 14:20" onto another phone days later would silently release an app. :::