alt Hacker NewsFor some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.
About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.
Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.
Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
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Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.
The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.