Is it me or is screentime for apple devices rubbish?

[schooloflostsocks]

So yet again DS 13 needed his phone during lesson time at school, I switched off screentime restrictions so he could use it and then forgot to switch it back on. I feel like I need training in how to use screentime better.

Why is it so useless if you switch it off and on again, you seem to have to set it all up from scratch again and put 'block at end' on every single restriction manually. I hate it.

please share your screentime wisdom. Thanks

could not agree more. I don’t understand how a company like Apple with all their resources can’t get this right.
It seems very glitchy.
I also am sure it’s not reliable on either reporting their screen time or sticking to it - ie set a limit for an hour and it seems easy to just use it for more than this (and it’s not my daughter doing anything intentional, I have physically had the phone so know she wasn’t using it but screen time shows as being used).

I am currently raging about this it is a massive issue

I have spent hours trying to work out why they don't block tik tok and Snapchat

Have tried absolutely everything. Including apple support

Highly suspicious it Is the two massively addictive apps that just do not turn off when the limit is up. They also are not affected by the night lock as every other app is

I feel my child is essentially on a totally unsafe device despite huge time trying to make it safe

My DDs don’t have TikTok or Snapchat but I don’t have any problems with screen time or turning it on/off, although it only operates on their phones at night - at school phones aren’t allowed to be seen so they turn them off at the gate.

I can switch it off & when I switch it back on it is the same as it was before (same schedules, same apps permitted at all times).

I had an issue once when I changed the screen time password, it changed and then subsequently could be unlocked with old password which DD knew
I really couldn't change it at all and I work on tech.
I tried apple support who didn't help much
I find family link on Android works so much better

I can’t understand why it doesn’t work properly. I thought my husband was doing a half arsed job until I checked it myself. He’s got all the settings on seemingly but the kids can still play Minecraft day and night. Plus don’t get me started how abysmal Siri is.

@SlipperyLizard I think it depends how determined kids are at getting round it.

From what I've seen (and I have spent hours trying to analyse it) - Snapchat and Tik tok are the two apps it fails to block! So if you can avoid them all together the device is safer. What's hard is once they get these things they are more determined than if they had never had them - I have so many regrets !

That’s interesting @waterrat

Given that my DDs were never curious enough as toddlers to even open a kitchen door to see what was behind (so the child locks just annoyed DH and me!) they certainly wouldn’t try to get round screen time.

They have android tablets with family link & that’s where Minecraft is so we also don’t have that problem.

My kids change the time zone to override the downtime and I can’t find a way to stop that 😫

I have so many regrets too. I could cry about the things that are going on with my DD and the meltdowns we have to navigate because of phones.

I’ve reported this to Apple before as well. I also have a problem where DC1’s screen time keeps changing and not going to blocked at night whereas DC2’s retains it as it should.

I forgot to check back in on this thread but it looks like it's just not me then! I didn't know about the time zone hack! Why on earth is it so bad? I can only assume, conspiracy style, that Apple want everyone addicted to their devices. I have DS' set up with one min allowed for all apps except calls and basic texts and safari not allowed at any time, however the bloody school keep asking them to get phones out in lessons for Kahoot and Blooket (I have checked and these are legitimately happening during class time). He is apparently the only child in the class who doesn't have free access to the internet in his pocket all the time 🙄

I also can't understand how all these kids have fewer limits on their phones and what is happening around these issues:

1. My primary fear is DS searching up underage porn or images of naked girls his own age. I work with children and would lose my job instantly and quite rightly if any such search was linked to my ISP.
2. If he has internet access he is 100% gone from family life, mostly on minecraft related YouTube videos and will not turn it off voluntarily
3. Road safety when out and about due to looking at phone

These are my reasons for the heavy restrictions.

is there another app for Apple people can recommend.

I think that if you get something like Qustodio, you can then allow certain websites on a phone but not others

can anyone confirm something like Qustodio is actually better than screentime? Screentime ought to be able to do those things @Glittertwins but in reality eg if I allow sparx.com for maths homework it will only allow the home page and then I have to keep authorising every bloody page of the homework. Same for Kerboodle and other homework sites, same for Blooket. So I end up lifting all the restrictions and each time they don't go back properly without a lot of fiddling around, and inevitably I don't always have time to do that

I totally agree that Apple should be fixing their bug riddled application but it’s been like that for over 5 years now, with no redress. If I remember correctly, Qustodio allows the subpages of a site as well. I uninstalled it a year or so ago as mine didn’t need quite that level on the laptops.

I recently found out my youngest managed to stumble across porn on their Apple device because the parental controls were not working the way I thought they were, so this is a totally valid fear. I had to download a parental control app, but they stopped supporting iOS and I couldn't find another good one to take its place, so I just switched to Android and have been using Google Family Link. My kid talked me into getting them an iPad because all their friends in a group chat use iPhones, but I ended up having to take it away from them again because the parental controls were still useless, and my kid was not respecting boundaries without them. Apple knows their products suck for parental control. They just don't care.

Have one minute on TikTok and Snapchat but if she gets around it you can see on the daily screen time report. She knows it = instant confiscation. Blocks work pretty well for me: DD13 has a periodic hissy fit about not being allowed various things - but we are lucky in her friends who mostly have similar restrictions to her. We learned the hard way with DD16 who found her way around everything and was drawn to it like a moth to a flame (asd, adhd etc). I wish all
our phones would just vaporise sometimes. Keep banging on about how the people who design these things are bad actors who only want to harvest our data etc etc

I still haven't sorted this out. DS seems to be using a guest login on the main computer that he uses for homework, the one I thought was adequately locked down. He's also doing something on his phone periodically that I can't identify and doesn't tally with what I see on the screentime report.

can anyone who has successfully locked down devices so they can be used for school work only tell me what you have done? Thanks!

Use a different tool, Apple simply isn’t good enough

I've tried something else - Apple Configurator. Took me ages and it's not really made for parental controls but I think I have properly shut down safari now by making it a 'supervised device' which doesn't allow Safari using configuratior

I've changed my work laptop login code.

It's like a bloody arms race keeping teens off the internet unsupervised

still interested to see how others are managing these issues

I’m not sure if this is helpful @schooloflostsocks as it sounds like my DD is older. She had a phone from year 7 and this was 10 years ago. You sound really across it!

She had no phone at school (school policy) and had to do all her home work on her laptop in the main room at home where me or her nanny could see. She never did school work on her phone either . Her homework app was accessed through her school site on the computer - so her phone was in the other room whilst she was doing school work.
( I am loan parent and was often at work so she had after school supervision/ nanny/ au pair).
Her phone was docked to charge before bed..
wifi was set on parental control.
her phone data was not unlimited until she was 16 - but could run out if she didn’t manage it or watched too many videos on it when she wasn’t on WiFi.

Appreciate the advice is quite old school :0(
she was obsessed with insta and snap by year 8 - but docking her phone downstairs before bed was just non negotiable until she was 15 and was about the only really firm rule I had and was part of the condition of getting a phone.

I agree that Apple is weak as it doesn’t like users to get “under the hood” of its tech as it were. You can’t really programme it.
If you want more finite control of times for different apps then you may need to get a different phone. Maybe a Google one?
think the whole family would move though and not have different members on different OS

Good luck!!

@Lilactimes yes it's helpful to hear how others have navigated all of this. My niece is a similar age to your dd and she was exposed to all sorts of stuff on Snapchat that was very hard for my sister to manage. Boys masturbating, other inappropriate images and requests. Snapchat is a definite no from us and for the time being it's no internet at all unless on the big screen in the living room. I know they'll look at their friends' phones etc but we have to do what we can. I think the culture is changing even in the last few years- my ds was the only one left out of his Y6 WhatsApp group three years ago but DD's current year 6 only has about 4 kids who are allowed on WhatsApp. I don't know how that will change next year. A Y7 I know says a lot of his friends had smartphones but their parents have backtracked and they now have basic Nokias.

I wanted mine to have smartphones for music and so we can track them. Also to message their friends but not in group chats as they always seem to go badly wrong

... and naively i thought old iPhones appropriately locked down would work fine.

didn't realise how hard it is to lock them down

Coming back to this thread as I can’t be the only one struggling with this. Following on from my previous post, the Apple Configurator did successfully lock down my two kids’ phones so that Safari was completely unavailable even through other apps or links and this seemed good for us until my son had his phone stolen and we got him an iPhone 13 which seems not to want to talk to the configurator. I’ve added screentime limits but they are literally useless- came back home yesterday to find he had spent 3 hours playing chess when it clearly says the chess app is locked down with a password (I know- chess- could be worse but he hadn’t done any homework and that was his only chance to do it before the deadline).

Now looking at third party parental controls again.

Recommendations welcome.