Apple’s Screen Time controls are failing parents. Parents are finding that when they use their iPhones to set restrictions for their kids’ devices, the changes don’t stick. The company says it’s working “to improve the situation.”
Apple’s cloud-based Family Sharing system is designed in part for parents to remotely schedule off-limits time and restrict apps and adult content on their children’s iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch models.
Julie Jargon for The Wall Street Journal:
“We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset,” an Apple spokeswoman said. “We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation.”
Downtime, found in Settings under Screen Time, is the tool parents use to define the hours each day that a kid’s device is limited or completely unusable. But when they check the setting lately, they often see the times they scheduled have reverted to a previous setting, or they see no restrictions at all.
This can go unnoticed for days or weeks—and kids don’t always report back when they get extra time for games and social media.
Apple previously acknowledged the bug, calling it “an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices.” However, the company had reported the issue fixed with iOS 16.5, which came out in May. In our testing the bug persists, even with the new public beta of iOS 17.
MacDailyNews Take: Come on, kids, self report! While Apple works on this issue, parents can set downtime limits directly on their kids’ devices; those work just fine.
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This has been going on since iOS 15.x. I complained to Apple multiple times. The worst setting to lose control over is the “Allow Account Changes” set to Don’t Allow. This is what control the child’s ability to change password, and even change the password to the AppleID.
I lost control of one child’s phone. Even with Apple support I could not recover. Thankfully, the child eventually relented and gave me back control. I had to take extra measures to protect myself should this happen again. And it did, a third time. This time I was prepared, BUT I had to go to extremes to protect this. Most parents would not know how, as it gets complicated, like registering the same AppleID on multiple devices to allow authentication during the recovery process, and even using a Recovery key.
Of course none of this would be necessary if Screen Time would not lose its settings and sync across all devices correctly.