Apple’s Screen Time updates are too little, too late

Apple spending a large portion of its WWDC keynote on parental controls was surprising for several reasons. But the most important thing is that despite all the air time, he did not announce Much new beyond the redesigned interface. Almost all of the promoted features already exist or are upgrades of existing options. Why Apple chose to do this is no mystery. You can track topics from recent milestones Social media prosecutions against Meta and Google to Protesters outside Cupertino headquarters today: Apple is trying to show the world that it is responsible When it comes to your children.

Only it really isn’t. Screen time is bad. As a mother of two whose children own Apple Watches, iPads, and iPhones, and who are now entering their late teens (age 18 and 15), I’ve spent years struggling with Apple’s parental controls. During that time, I’ve gone through what feels like nearly 2,000 Screen Time passcodes and gained several new gray hairs.

Screen Time simply isn’t a reliable way to control your child’s device use; The only real way to limit screen time is to remove the screen. This is something Apple is unlikely to ever get behind, and something that becomes increasingly untenable as your child gets older for a whole host of reasons.

I won’t get into those matters here, or argue about how much responsibility one should put on the technology developer versus the parents when it comes to parental controls — that’s a whole societal debate we can get into another time.

My problem with Screen Time is that the most powerful technology company in the world, with vast experience in hardware and software, has half-assed “parental control” for many years, and is now trying to put lipstick on a pig.

There are mountains of complaints in user forums about Screen Time not working, being inaccurate, kids finding ways around it, and frustration with its limitations. In 2024, Joanna Stern in The Wall Street Journal A bug has been reported that allows children to bypass Content restrictions on screen time For years.

The only good thing Apple has done to Screen Time since I started using it nearly a decade ago is adding an alert that tells you when “someone” uses your Screen Time passcode — and that was last year.

However, we are here, and there Some updates are coming with iOS 27 this fall To be happy. A browsing request, which requires them to ask for permission to visit a new website, would be useful for monitoring children’s web usage. Although you’ve been able to ask them to purchase an app download for a while, as I well know, kids bypass the limitations of apps like Discord and TikTok by going to websites instead. You can block individual websites, but this is a really fun game.

One thing Apple still needs to fix here is the ability for a child to re-download a previously downloaded app to their or a family member’s account. According to the Discord debacle, my daughter was able to re-download the app even after deleting it from her device, without having to ask, because I downloaded it.

Contact Limits, which lets you manage your child’s contacts and set who can call and message them and when, isn’t new either. They are also petty and frustrating. I ended up turning it off when neither of us could add contacts to her phone. This was a problem when she was on a school field trip and needed to add her teacher’s number, but it became a bigger problem when Screen Time prevented her from calling me. Some of the issues I’ve encountered seem to stem from the time it takes to sync across devices, especially when you’re not together. Hopefully, the redesigned Screen Time interface will also include some behind-the-scenes improvements.

“Time Allowances” was the feature Apple spent the most time on in the keynote, even though it was actually a feature. I’ve been able to set time limits on apps for a while. What’s new is that you’ll get it now Some “expert” guidance. Regarding the amount of time you should give your child for each app or category. Great, more parent guilt when you set your Netflix slider to four hours so you can finish your report.

What I would like to see are more granular time allowance categories. For example, the Entertainment section includes YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix. I’m glad my kid has Spotify for several hours, but not YouTube. You can set time limits for individual apps, but it should be a lot.

Speaking of “a lot,” managing your kids’ screen time seems like a full-time job. I’m very interested in the redesigned Screen Time interface, which will hopefully be more usable than the current method of having to search across multiple screens in settings. I’ve lost count of the number of parents who have asked me to help them turn on parental controls on their children’s iPad or iPhone. When I search for “Parental Controls” in Settings, nothing appears.

I’m disappointed that Apple didn’t make Screen Time a separate app; I think this would improve ease of use, but I mostly want it so I can lock it with Face ID. Kids are deceitful. My daughter regularly jumps on my phone without me seeing her and unchecks the block option at the end of the limit for each app. It’s tricky, as you have to dive into many of the menus pretty deep to find them, which means I don’t often notice the change. The dangers of raising a technology-savvy teenager.

If Apple wants to take credit for protecting our kids from the dangers of screen time, it needs to start with controls that parents can rely on.