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Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: -

Why does it seem like many parents are unaware that a hand me down iPhone can be heavily locked down with screen time settings? A list of things you can do: - allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app - effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps - disable installing apps from app store - disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact - none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin - also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone. So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it. Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago
I mean, a landline + phone is way cheaper to be fair
- schwartzworld 7mo ago
  Or a MagicJack
light_hue_1 7mo ago
Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution. What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).
- choo-t 7mo ago
  > What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?
  - M95D 7mo ago
    It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).
    - choo-t 7mo ago
      Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted. It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.
      - ForHackernews 7mo ago
        The jukebox I got for my basement is not a restricted Spotify-enabled smart speaker. It's a different device that does something different.
        choo-t 7mo ago
        First, you got it for yourself, so you chose to use a jukebox (or in other words : restrict your listening to specific titles on physical media) instead to impose it to other, which make a big difference in what people see as a restrictions(instead of a choice, which is self inflicted). Chosing a Tin Can is obviously to restrict your kid usage of communication, it's the nature of the purchase of the device.
jrflowers 7mo ago
I don’t think people are buying this fun novelty landline phone because they haven’t heard of parental controls
- eloisant 7mo ago
  As another commenter said, the problem with parental controls on a smartphone is your kid constantly nagging you to approve installation of one more app, or extend their daily limit "just for today" (again). With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.
  - jrflowers 7mo ago
    I know as a kid I would have hated that and put a lot of effort into circumventing it.
janfoeh 7mo ago
For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice. About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device. Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing. Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
- locao 7mo ago
  Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
- vtbassmatt 7mo ago
  The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.
benchloftbrunch 7mo ago
Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap. I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.
- eloisant 7mo ago
  There are: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210 https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210 (and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)
throwaway_19sz 7mo ago
Because it’s a lot easier to refuse to buy an expensive gadget for your kids than to refuse to press a few buttons to set them free.
Retr0id 7mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
xp84 7mo ago
Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired. Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.
mountainb 7mo ago
All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer? This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.
BeetleB 7mo ago
How do I lock down the iPhone so it works only at home?
- lostmsu 7mo ago
  Never put a SIM in it?
  - BeetleB 7mo ago
    Then how can they make calls when home?
    - lostmsu 7mo ago
      By using any VOIP provider.
StevenNunez 7mo ago
Hello! Parent that's fully aware of this. My son has access to a landline and it solves the problem of tech as a tool vs a past time. If he thinks of his friend, he calls, friends reach out etc. No scrolling for something to do. I see my phone usage and am constantly trying to introduce friction into it. This is an extension of that concept.
StrangeWill 7mo ago
Apple makes this a huge PITA, along with having to do a significant amount of it from another apple device. I'm glad we ditched iPads, it sucked.
- breakpointalpha 7mo ago
  This has to be intentional. Drug dealer getting the kids hooked early is priority #1. Give just enough "parental control" to lure parents in. Make it just annoying enough that the parents eventually give up and the kid is the one pushing the drug the entire time.
kgwxd 7mo ago
I did that for my kid when he was 10 or so. He had it "hacked" before I knew it. If he had done it himself, I would have been proud, but some other kid did it. Never even tried after that. He's 17 now, he's fine.
sparrc 7mo ago
As a parent, two reasons: 1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now". 2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.
- mixmastamyk 7mo ago
  Indeed, there's an additional problem as well. There are settings, and then there are settings that allow one to change the settings. Not only are there hundreds of settings but they are duplicated in this way. Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.
mixmastamyk 7mo ago
Our kid breaks through the screen time regularly, even with new passcodes. Have a theory it is done from the wife's macbook, but not entirely sure. Gave up; would not recommend or use again.
BloondAndDoom 7mo ago
I think we are except Apple lockdown experience for this is total shit show, not only you need to spend so much time but also if you need to change something (at least for me) it just reset all the previous options, because I turned it off to manually install something that was locked down I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.
- lm411 7mo ago
  Yeah. Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc. I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.

Fire-Dragon-DoL 7mo ago

I mean, a landline + phone is way cheaper to be fair

schwartzworld 7mo ago
Or a MagicJack

light_hue_1 7mo ago

Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution. What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).

choo-t 7mo ago
> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them. Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?
- M95D 7mo ago
  It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).
  - choo-t 7mo ago
    Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted. It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.
    - ForHackernews 7mo ago
      The jukebox I got for my basement is not a restricted Spotify-enabled smart speaker. It's a different device that does something different.
      - choo-t 7mo ago
        First, you got it for yourself, so you chose to use a jukebox (or in other words : restrict your listening to specific titles on physical media) instead to impose it to other, which make a big difference in what people see as a restrictions(instead of a choice, which is self inflicted). Chosing a Tin Can is obviously to restrict your kid usage of communication, it's the nature of the purchase of the device.

jrflowers 7mo ago

I don’t think people are buying this fun novelty landline phone because they haven’t heard of parental controls

eloisant 7mo ago
As another commenter said, the problem with parental controls on a smartphone is your kid constantly nagging you to approve installation of one more app, or extend their daily limit "just for today" (again). With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.
- jrflowers 7mo ago
  I know as a kid I would have hated that and put a lot of effort into circumventing it.

janfoeh 7mo ago

For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice. About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device. Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing. Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/

locao 7mo ago
Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
vtbassmatt 7mo ago
The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.

benchloftbrunch 7mo ago

Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap. I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.

eloisant 7mo ago
There are: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210 https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210 (and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)

throwaway_19sz 7mo ago

Because it’s a lot easier to refuse to buy an expensive gadget for your kids than to refuse to press a few buttons to set them free.

Retr0id 7mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

xp84 7mo ago

Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired. Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.

mountainb 7mo ago

All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer? This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.

BeetleB 7mo ago

How do I lock down the iPhone so it works only at home?

lostmsu 7mo ago
Never put a SIM in it?
- BeetleB 7mo ago
  Then how can they make calls when home?
  - lostmsu 7mo ago
    By using any VOIP provider.

StevenNunez 7mo ago

Hello! Parent that's fully aware of this. My son has access to a landline and it solves the problem of tech as a tool vs a past time. If he thinks of his friend, he calls, friends reach out etc. No scrolling for something to do. I see my phone usage and am constantly trying to introduce friction into it. This is an extension of that concept.

StrangeWill 7mo ago

Apple makes this a huge PITA, along with having to do a significant amount of it from another apple device. I'm glad we ditched iPads, it sucked.

breakpointalpha 7mo ago
This has to be intentional. Drug dealer getting the kids hooked early is priority #1. Give just enough "parental control" to lure parents in. Make it just annoying enough that the parents eventually give up and the kid is the one pushing the drug the entire time.

kgwxd 7mo ago

I did that for my kid when he was 10 or so. He had it "hacked" before I knew it. If he had done it himself, I would have been proud, but some other kid did it. Never even tried after that. He's 17 now, he's fine.

sparrc 7mo ago

As a parent, two reasons: 1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now". 2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.

mixmastamyk 7mo ago
Indeed, there's an additional problem as well. There are settings, and then there are settings that allow one to change the settings. Not only are there hundreds of settings but they are duplicated in this way. Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.

mixmastamyk 7mo ago

Our kid breaks through the screen time regularly, even with new passcodes. Have a theory it is done from the wife's macbook, but not entirely sure. Gave up; would not recommend or use again.

BloondAndDoom 7mo ago

I think we are except Apple lockdown experience for this is total shit show, not only you need to spend so much time but also if you need to change something (at least for me) it just reset all the previous options, because I turned it off to manually install something that was locked down I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.

lm411 7mo ago
Yeah. Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc. I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.