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As a parent of kids with iThings, the parental controls/screen time experience is incredibly bad. I have no idea why they are not interested in having it work.

• samename 18d ago
  The more time kids spend on the device, the more revenue Apple generates. They don’t have any incentive for it to really work.
• alex_suzuki 18d ago
  100% agree. We had to turn it off because it was too frustrating for everyone involve. Now we’re at “trust, but verify” where “verify” is looking at Screen Time stats at the end of each week. My only plausible explanation is that no one who works at Apple has kids.
  • Agingcoder 18d ago
    That’s a good idea . So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough?
    • red369 17d ago
      I've never been quite clear that the numbers are completely trustworthy, but at least the counting is more solid than the restrictions and the passwords. One thing I've noticed on my own device, that, counter-intuitively, screentime also seems to include time when the screen is off, e.g. playing music through Safari with the screen turned off. As an example of the fragility of the screentime passwords, the password on a child's device can often be removed by simply turning off the screentime password - it will not always prompt for the current password. Until recently, I actually thought that it was intentional that a password was not required to disable the screentime password on a child device. I recently had a crazy experience where many restrictions and a screentime password seemed to suddenly get enabled on a child's device. We had just turned on screentime, but without restrictions or a password. It seems as though a bug caused the restrictions to revert to those used a long time ago during an exam period, with very strict time restrictions. It was almost unusable, and no one knew the screentime password. The crazy part is that I tried dozens of passwords - many on the first day, and then one a day for weeks. I was certainly the only one touching the device from that point. One day, when I tried to turn off the screentime password, it just turned off. Unlike every other day for the past few weeks, it did not prompt for a password at all.
      • Agingcoder 17d ago
        Thanks this mirrors my experience. I’ll try your trust and verify approach then.
    • RobMurray 17d ago
      I wouldn't trust them. I have seen screen time over 24H at least twice.
    • alex_suzuki 16d ago
      > So you’re telling me that I can trust the on device numbers enough? Not at all :-) But at least this process doesn’t lead to pain and suffering because either the ScreenTime notification doesn’t arrive on a parent device, or the “Allow” action isn’t picked up by the child’s device. The whole messaging part to get permission to do something is really unreliable, at least in our household.
  • Melatonic 17d ago
    Isn't it being revamped a big feature of iOS 27 ?
    • Agingcoder 17d ago
      Yes and that’s my point. I don’t care about any ui or features change - I want the very basic functionality to work and it currently doesn’t.
      • Melatonic 17d ago
        What doesn't work ?
        • Agingcoder 17d ago
          Fair question. I expect the following from such a system : I set a time limit per app/set of apps,and the phone locks said apps once the limit is reached. In theory, this is what it does, in practice it almost never works : it doesn’t lock, gets broken whenever you upgrade the os, gets broken whenever your child upgrades the os, can be trivially bypassed by a kid, cannot be unlocked when you want it to unlock remotely etc I’ve also seen trivially bad data ( phone usage when it was in my pocket ). It’s worth noting you also need an Idevice to set it remotely - if your significant other has an android device he or she is out of luck. I was very surprised at how appallingly bad it was - just try it for a few weeks and you’ll immediately notice it’s badly broken but somehow doesn’t fix it. Contrast this to google’s system which, well, works. Edit : it’s so mind bogglingly bad that I’m genuinely curious to talk to someone who works at apple about this.
          • Melatonic 16d ago
            So I don't have kids but in the keynote I remember them making a big deal about totally revamping it in 27. I know they definitely added a way to officially lock it (with a passcode) so your kids won't be able to theoretically just deactivate screen time. I think before you technically could do sorta the same thing (you can restrict almost any app to require FaceID or passcode to unlock). There's also the assistive access or whatever which really locks the phone down but that seems more like for old people. Alternatively if you wanted to get advanced you could maybe (not sure if it's free) create an Apple business account and try to manage the phone like corporations do. Or you may just be able to generate a configuration profile for free and add to the device. I would expect that process to be a lot more robust generally. You can control pretty much anything. Downside is if you don't have an MDM your stuck with whatever settings are baked into that config profile. Depending what you want to restrict you could pair it with something like NextDNS and lock it down to only safe sites. Sounds like Android is way better though in this regard. Having to setup a child specific account at the beginning of setup sounds like a pain. If I ever have kids makes me really want to only give them a dumb phone or something like the new (unreleased as of yet) Commodore Callback - has some smartphone features but intentionally no social media
• dabeeeenster 18d ago
  The state of parental controls on apple devices is absolutely appalling.
• hedora 16d ago
  Android’s is also maliciously bad. Oddly, Alcatel has (had?) a nice version for their landfill androids a few years ago.