I tried looking in the feedback posts since V4, but I haven’t found the answer.
The old UI allowed users to group apps together. This allowed users to easily set schedules or restrictions for a group of apps. In the new UI, I can’t find a way to do this. It appears to me that for each schedule or block, the user needs to manually select all the apps they want to block. Screenshot shows my view when I am trying to create a new schedule.
Will Opal be bringing back the ability to group apps? What was the reason for its removal? If it won’t be brought back, could you please explain the justification for this design?
Hi @Ciestupinan ,
App Groups were intentionally removed in V4. The replacement is the suggestion strip: when you open the app picker to set up a rule or schedule, Opal shows a horizontal row of quick-pick suggestions based on apps you’ve already marked as distracting, apps in your other rules, and (for users who upgraded from V3) the apps that were in your old groups. The idea is that the app remembers what you care about so you don’t have to rebuild from scratch each time, without you needing to explicitly manage named groups.
Why it was removed: V4 was a ground-up rewrite with a fundamentally different rule architecture. The grouping system added complexity that didn’t fit the new model cleanly, and the team bet on surfacing smart suggestions as a lighter alternative.
Will it come back? There’s nothing in our pipeline pointing to app groups returning in their original form. The suggestion strip is V4’s answer to that workflow.
I understand that’s frustrating if you relied heavily on groups, especially for power-users who had well-organised setups. I’ll log this as explicit feedback, if enough people flag it, it gives the team a clear signal about what’s actually missed. In the meantime, the best workaround is to use the Distracting Apps list (My Apps tab) as your “source of truth” for apps you want to block as those surface as suggestions in every rule you create.
