What is going on with my iPhone screen time?

September 26, 2021 7:44 AM

I received my weekly screen time notification this morning for my iPhone SE and it said I had an average of 13 hours per day last week, which I know is wildly inaccurate. When I looked at which apps were being used most, it said I was continuously spending time on Egnyte, which is not even installed on any of my devices. What could be happening here?

I’ve never even heard of Egnyte before today. I verified that it’s not installed on any of my devices (I also have an iPad, Apple Watch, and a Roku that are linked to my Apple ID—none of these are included in my screen time monitoring). Yet there it is at the top of the list of most used apps in my screen time settings. I set an app limit of one minute per day to prevent it from running, but I’m worried about what might be going on and what it means for my privacy, as it looks like file uploading and screen recording are among Egnyte’s capabilities. Googling revealed nothing as far as known issues or malware. I do not use this phone for work and have not clicked any weird links in recent memory. Can someone help me understand what is going on with this and how I can protect any potential breaches of privacy?


Just before posting I decided to delete the minute limit for Egnyte to see if the problem started when I upgraded ios (adding the limit removed any mention of the app in my previous screen time) and it changed nothing. Everything looked normal again and now there is no mention at all of Egnyte anywhere, like it never even happened! Somehow this makes it all even more unsettling.

posted by Fuego to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Have you ever sold an apple device that may have been refurbished and used elsewhere?
posted by nickggully at 7:57 AM on September 26, 2021

Response by poster: I have sold my previous iPhones back to Verizon, but the last time was over a year ago and there are no unknown devices in the list of devices associated with my AppleID.
posted by Fuego at 8:08 AM on September 26, 2021

I'm not tech savvy and this could be a long-shot, but do you suppose Egnyte's customer support might be of any assistance?? Their phone number is 1-650-265-0500
posted by SageTrail at 8:48 AM on September 26, 2021

Did you upgrade any of your devices to iOS 15 or iPad OS 15?

I think there's a bug with Screen Time - my single device reports that I've spent 22 hours on a single web site for two separate days. Granted, it's reporting web sites that I visited - but I certainly didn't visit them for 22 hours a day.
posted by meowzilla at 10:13 AM on September 26, 2021

Response by poster: I’m not sure how useful contacting Egnyte’s customer support would be, considering that I don’t have the app downloaded on any device, no user account, or anything other than this odd blip that would make me a customer of theirs.

I upgraded to ios 15 on Thursday, which is why I was trying to see when this started. I’m less concerned with a potential Screen Time bug than the potential that an app that can track my activity has somehow been installed without my knowledge. My phone has not been out of my control anytime in recent memory, but I’m not sure what someone could do remotely.
posted by Fuego at 12:16 PM on September 26, 2021

Is it possible that some other app is using Egnyte for its own cloud storage? It seems more like something that companies buy and use, rather than individuals. Maybe there's something else that syncs using an Egnyte-provided software component and they set it up wrong so that it looks to iOS like an app running?

Now that you've throttled its ability to run whenever it likes, maybe something else will reveal itself by misbehaving.
posted by qbject at 3:59 PM on September 26, 2021 [2 favorites]

I don't know, it's probably just a bug. Goodness knows there are enough iPhone bugs to go around. Are you, however, in any way worried that you might be the target of advanced threat such as a country or large organization? Don't mean to make you paranoid, but an anti-malware app would be the perfect place to hide something.
posted by wnissen at 9:44 AM on September 27, 2021

Response by poster: It's been a few days and absolutely no sign on my phone of anything unusual anymore. Last week's screen time appears normal, and Egnyte doesn't show up on my app limits list. There's no indication that any other app was using it, everything is completely back to normal. I'll chalk the whole thing up to a very odd bug, there's no reason to think anyone would be targeting my phone for anything and even if they were, they'd probably just find out I spend the majority of my phone time on Instagram and playing Two Dots.
posted by Fuego at 9:40 AM on September 29, 2021 [1 favorite]