The whole "Ask for permission" system is broken. I purchased two of the latest iPads. My wife has the latest iPhone. The kids need to click the "Ask" button when installing apps. On both iPads, my wife'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.
In general as an android user I couldn'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's more user error assuming the world's most popular kids tablet could support multiple users.
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's clear that no-one who actually has kids is working on parental controls.
(No before everyone chimes in telling me I shouldn't filter my kids internet: if I don't they'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.
All of Apple's documentation is terrible. All of their developer ecosystem is terrible. They do care about you writing software for their devices if you are not an Apple employee.
Time is better spent writing apps for the web, android, Linux, and Windows. You'll at least be productive and have access to resources and tools that work.
Same experience. Its half baked, and you don't know which half, until you try and implement it. I have a lot more appreciation for Android documentation, after seeing what IOS has to offer.
It does. This falls under "Communication Limits" - you can define one set of contacts allowed "during screen time", and separate set of "specific contacts" allowed "during downtime".
True, but "during downtime, only apps that you choose to allow will be available". You can configure a phone to only allow calls (and no other function), and only to a limited set of people, during downtime by adding the phone app to the "always allowed" app list and enabling communication limits as above.
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.
Because this article is about ScreenTime on Apple devices. That is the same reason they don't talk about why back-up cameras in cars are so low resolution, or how you'd need to eat an insane amount of tuna to have mercury poisoning. It just isn't what the article is about.
You knew that, though. Apple is the market leader in mobile devices in the USA. Heavy lies the crown.
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.
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…
I was so proud when I noticed my young child using the always allowed Libby app for hours on end. Finally, setting time limits has turned them into a book worm!
Only to realize there’s a built in browser that you can bring up if the book embeds a link.
It’s a safari browser but under the rules of the Libby app.
My kid routinely asked for access to Photos, which seemed pretty benign. Turned out she was screen recording entire Netflix movies and saving them in her Photos cache, not only bypassing every single restriction but also tanking my iCloud storage quota.
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'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.
> Apple either does not have or does not care about real world cross device testing for Screen Time.
FWIW, we've used it for years with many devices and never saw an issue like this.
The boring reality is that bug-free software at scale is impossible, and millions of Screen Time users experience bugs that no QA group, regardless of resources, could have tested.
Screen Time used to be so buggy that several years ago when I tried to use it, it was basically impossible to make it work at all. I agree with you that millions of Screen Time users are experiencing bugs.
While it's impossible for software to be bug free, we can expect that a company with significant resources should be able to make a feature like this work reliably in basic operation.
> While it's impossible for software to be bug free, we can expect that a company with significant resources should be able to make a feature like this work reliably in basic operation.
It's also funny that when something works fine for 99.9% of users, it's actually more infuriating to the people it affects than if it were broken for everybody. It sucks that you haven't been able to use it.
This is one of those things I'm okay with being broken. It feels like every time this discussion comes up, HNers white-knight about being a parent and how much it means to shelter their child. I sympathize with those people, but surely they remember being a kid at the library working around their timer so they can play more Commander Keen. Surely they understand what it's like to rebel against some arbitrary limit intended to annoy you.
So... let these controls be broken. We all know this battle boils down to kids listening to Spotify over their emergency dialer to a Twilio lambda server, so let's not let it go there.
I don’t think we realize just how much damage an online incident can affect children because we’re no longer ten years old. While I’d love to trust companies to have the best interest in all audiences in mind, my child went down a YouTube rabbit hole of Minecraft, Scratch, and innocent kid videos before being suggested Slenderman, spooky ghost stories, and inevitably a rebirthing video where the participant died.
Several years of behavioral therapy fixed the night terrors and ticks (he is a spectrum child tbh) but the anxiety attacks in certain situations hasn’t. Neither has my ability to unblock YouTube on our DNS because the recommendation engine is clearly predatory.
My child is old enough now to circumvent arbitrary restrictions. Whether it’s friends, VPN, or coding up some clever solution. But that effort comes from maturity and reasoning. Not some corp serving ads and clicks.
I hate to burst your bubble, but this is a possibility anywhere that they have personal agency.
Do you follow them to school and listen to them on the playground? Do you check their friend's phones to make sure they are sufficiently controlled too? Do you take away their Chromebooks when they visit each other for a playdate? Did you remember to block Brazzers on your DirecTV account?
When I was in elementary school, I went to my friend's house after class so we could watch Mario explode into red paint and gore on Newgrounds for hours on-end. Your child will inevitably do something similar.
A solution doesn't have to be perfect to be effective for the majority.
Many parents do make sure to get to know the parents of their kids' friends, and the household rules. If kids are showing each other explicit stuff in school there are usually policies and even laws to address that.
All that said, Apple markets their solutions as things that "just work". So it's fair to criticize them for gaps that can be reasonably addressed, especially when they have such a huge war chest.
> When I was in elementary school, I went to my friend's house after class so we could watch Mario explode into red paint and gore on Newgrounds for hours on-end. Your child will inevitably do something similar.
the point of progress is to make active efforts towards making these things happen less and less in the future
pretending like it was ok just because they happened to you is how cycles of abuse continue to perpetuate through the generations
If it’s at a school, I can get the school involved.
If it was at the library, I can sue the library for not implementing the legally mandatory internet filters.
If it was another adult, I can slap him with a misdemeanor, at a minimum, for exposing pornography to children.
If it was a childhood friend, I can stop allowing my child to visit that friend.
But it’s my own “personal insecurity” if I don’t do something about my own home. By that logic what is the point of Speed Limits on Highways? “Unless a law is 100% effective it is pointless” is not a stance you would apply anywhere else.
> But it’s my own “personal insecurity” if I don’t do something about my own home.
Yes.
You could address this healthily. You could sit down and talk to your child about the scary websites and give them a primer on stranger danger and the like. My parents did the same thing before I turned 10. Instead you're prolonging the last vestiges of their innocence and making them less-aware as a result. By making unknown things a reward for them, how do you think they will react in the future?
It's your choice, at the end of the day. Maybe I was just raised wrong or something, but I think you're doing more harm than good.
> Instead you're prolonging the last vestiges of their innocence and making them less-aware as a result. By making unknown things a reward for them, how do you think they will react in the future?
My parents had parental controls on everything as I grew up. We played on Nintendo systems since they're mostly family friendly. We had "dumb" phones until I was able to buy my own smart phone.
My "innocence" wasn't prolonged as a result and I also wasn't a "less aware" child. Instead, I went outside and played with friends in the real world. I'm very appreciative that my parents limited screen time and blocked pornography on all our devices. It didn't work 100% effectively, but the 99% effectiveness definitely impacted how I grew up in a positive way.
If you weren't raised this way, maybe it's not a great idea to assume this method causes more harm than good? My experience is definitely anecdotal, but I'm sure that it's not an isolated experience.
> Enterprising kids have been known to find ways around parental controls. Baker and other parents I interviewed say their kids aren’t hacking the system.
To provide a service that doesn’t work is poor engineering.
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) ...
In general as an android user I couldn'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's more user error assuming the world's most popular kids tablet could support multiple users.