Apple’s Parental Controls Are Broken

The whole &quot;Ask for permission&quot; system is broken. I purchased two of the latest iPads. My wife has the latest iPhone. The kids need to click the &quot;Ask&quot; button when installing apps. On both iPads, my wife&#x27;s iPhone did not receive notifications. The workaround I found on Reddit is to rename the iphone and reboot. Every month or so, it stops working again and I have to repeat the process.<p>In general as an android user I couldn&#x27;t believe how many issues I encountered just setting them up. I also made the wrong assumption I could set it up in my name and add a kids account - but that&#x27;s more user error assuming the world&#x27;s most popular kids tablet could support multiple users.

Apple&#x27;s parental controls are close to useless.<p>I wanted to give my kids access to a computer with just a few allowed websites, but it turns out that is almost impossible. Apps like Spotify are randomly blocked by web site whitelists, and sometimes they are unaffected... it&#x27;s clear that no-one who actually has kids is working on parental controls.<p>(No before everyone chimes in telling me I shouldn&#x27;t filter my kids internet: if I don&#x27;t they&#x27;ll use the computer exclusively for watching the dumbest YouTube videos ever made. I want to give them access to a computer for doing productive things, not just another device for watching video)

Apple Screen Time API is a hot mess. It’s definitely one of the most poorly documented APIs out there. I dare you to take a look at Apple’s documentation. While playing with it, I also found out - I wasn’t the only one - that some stuff such as the STWebpageController does not work correctly in the Simulator and you must use a real device.

What Screen Time should offer: Child can’t unlock when time is up. Emergency calls and calls to parents are allowed, but nothing else.<p>This seems really simple. Times up should mean times up.

Ok apple’s screen time is moderately broken. But why is no one talking about the absolute dumpster fire that is Google Family Link which is, by far, the most infuriating software product I’ve used in the last decade? I’ll spare HN the rant.

The best parental control continues to be putting devices in a hidden place out of sight when you don’t want kids to use them. Not a bad idea for adults too :)

I have been upset over this for years. It is really bad on MacOS, which among other things, breaks open and lets kids open Private Windows, with no filtering, after only a few hours of uptime.

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Biggest problem is app embedded web views don’t count as Safari, so if you try to block the web on a mobile, you have to block or time restrict every default app that has the remote possibility to open a link to a web view. Looking at you, Stocks…

About 5 or 6 years ago I tried the Safari parental controls for my kid. they worked OK for most the net except for anything google. I don&#x27;t know if they changed, but at the time any interaction with a google property (that my kid wanted to use, search, maps and especially earth) would create a unique URL that required a parental permission popup to be clicked. Basically a popup per click. Made the whole thing completely unusable and had to disable it.

This has been the case for years and years. Apple either does not have or does not care about real world cross device testing for Screen Time.

Parental controls several of our apple devices (all running the latest updates) turned themselves off for no reason, without notice, last week. With some actually pretty bad outcomes as a result. Until reading this, I thought either I had screwed up the configuration (or the kids had guessed my passcode) ...