Track App Usage on Windows Privately on Your Own PC

Android has a Digital Wellbeing screen. Windows does not. I wanted that view for the apps on my own PC, not a cloud account that stores the day somewhere else.

TL;DR

• Windows does not have an Android-style app usage screen.
• I wanted that view on my own machine, so I built Flowline.
• It logs the foreground app, and the browser tab when the extension is connected.
• The database is a local SQLite file. No account, no upload.

Windows does not show app usage the way Android does

On a phone, Digital Wellbeing is one screen: which apps, how long, how often you picked the thing up. I kept looking for the same screen on Windows.

It is not there. Task Manager tells you what is running now. Settings can show battery use by app. Neither is a day-long log of what was actually in front of you. Screen time, if you find a number at all, is not the same as app usage. A machine can sit "active" in Outlook while you are in a browser tab that has nothing to do with work.

That was the gap. Not another timer I had to start. A log of the foreground window, on a PC I already use all day.

What I went looking for

I was at a bootcamp and started hunting for a task. The search was ordinary: focus trackers, digital wellbeing, app usage. A lot of what came back was built for teams, or for a phone, or for a vendor dashboard.

I did not want a manager view. I did not want an Android app either. I already knew what my phone was doing. I wanted the Windows machine, because that is where the work day actually goes.

The idea that matched was a local focus tracker: watch the foreground app, tag the time, keep the file on disk. That became Flowline.

What I built

Flowline is a free Windows app, MIT licensed, for Windows 10 and 11. It is an automatic time tracker for the app in front of you. With the optional Chrome or Edge extension, the active tab is logged too, so time lands on a domain instead of one big "Chrome" bucket.

Rules tag that time as productive, neutral, or distracting. There is a dashboard, a daily deep-work target, a streak, and Pomodoro-style blocks (15, 25, or 50 minutes). Idle time is left out. Export is CSV or JSON from the local database.

It does not record the screen, log keystrokes, or block sites. A distraction alert is a notification, not a lock. Privacy details are in the Flowline privacy note.

If you already use ActivityWatch or RescueTime, the comparison is the right page. I am not going to restate it here.

How tracking works

Windows notifies the app when the foreground window changes. There is no start button, and no loop polling the desktop all day.

Each switch is matched against rules: app, domain, or a keyword in the window title. About 80 defaults ship with the app. When one is wrong, you edit it.

The browser extension is optional. Without it, a browser is just a window. With it, the extension reports the active tab over a local connection, and only while that browser is the focused window.

Closing the window does not stop tracking. The tray icon keeps going. Launch on login is optional. The longer version is in how Flowline tracking works.

Most of the code came from the models

On my own, this was a one- or two-month project. I did not have that month.

I had a bootcamp weekend, then spare time after. Google Stitch gave me the first UI. In VS Code, GitHub Copilot did most of the typing, across Claude, GPT, Opus, and Grok. About 99% of the code was written by those models. Half of the app came together in about an hour that weekend. The rest landed over a few days, not a few weeks.

That hour was not a finished product. The models are fast at the shape of a thing and sloppy at the edges: a session that does not survive a restart, a total that ignores midnight, a rule that matches too broadly. I still had to read the diffs, reject the ones that were wrong, and keep a short list of what "done" meant. The speed was real. The review was the actual work.

If you try the same path, do not measure it by how fast the first screen appears. Measure it by whether you can explain where each hour in the database came from.

What it is not for

Flowline is for personal desk work on your own PC. It is not a tool for an employer, a classroom, or a parent watching someone else.

It is also not a website blocker, and it is not an Android app. If the thing you want is the phone's Digital Wellbeing screen, this will not replace it. It only covers the Windows machine.

FAQ

Does Windows have Digital Wellbeing?

No. Android has that screen. Windows does not give you a day-long breakdown of which apps were in the foreground. Battery stats and Task Manager are not a substitute.

How do I see which apps I use on Windows?

You need something that records the foreground window over the day. Flowline does that locally. The Windows download is an installer; tracking starts on launch.

Does this upload my activity?

No. Activity sits in a SQLite file under your user profile. There is no Flowline account and no sync server. You can export the file or delete the database.

Can it track browser tabs, or only apps?

Both, if you install the Chrome or Edge extension. Without it, the browser is one app. With it, time is attributed to the active tab's domain.

Is the data useful on day one?

The log is. The labels are only as good as the rules. The defaults cover common apps and sites; the first fix is usually one miscategorized tool you use every day.