Apple’s Screen Time updates arrive too late to matter

For nearly a decade, I have wrestled with Apple’s Screen Time as a mother of two now aged 18 and 15. My children have cycled through Apple Watches, iPads, and iPhones, and I have endured what feels like thousands of forgotten passcodes and a fresh crop of gray hairs. The hard truth is that Screen Time is not a reliable tool for managing a child’s device usage. The only foolproof method is removing the screen entirely,a step Apple will never advocate for and one that becomes increasingly impractical as kids grow older.

I won’t wade into the broader debate about where responsibility lies between tech developers and parents. That’s a separate conversation for another day. My frustration is simpler: the world’s most valuable technology company, with vast expertise in both hardware and software, has delivered half-baked parental controls for years and is now attempting to dress them up with minor updates.

User forums are flooded with complaints about Screen Time inaccuracies, children bypassing restrictions, and frustrating limitations. In 2024, Joanna Stern at The Wall Street Journal exposed a bug that let kids evade content restrictions for years. The only meaningful improvement Apple has made since I started using the feature nearly a decade ago came last year: an alert that tells you when someone has used the Screen Time passcode.

Still, the updates arriving with iOS 27 this fall offer some hope. The new Ask to Browse feature, which requires kids to request permission before visiting a new website, could help monitor web activity. While Ask to Buy has long existed for app downloads, children often bypass restrictions on apps like Discord and TikTok by using websites instead. Blocking individual sites is a tedious game of whack-a-mole. Apple also needs to fix the loophole where a child can redownload an app previously installed on a family member’s account without requesting permission,a problem I encountered firsthand when my daughter reinstalled Discord after I had deleted it.

Communication Limits, which let you control who your child can contact and when, are not new,and they remain fiddly and frustrating. I eventually turned the feature off when neither my daughter nor I could add contacts to her phone. The trouble escalated when she couldn’t call me during a school field trip, and later when Screen Time blocked her from reaching me entirely. Many issues seem tied to slow device syncing, especially when family members are apart. I hope the redesigned Screen Time interface includes behind-the-scenes fixes.

Apple devoted significant keynote time to Time Allowances, even though this feature already existed. The new twist is “expert” guidance on how much time to permit per app or category. Great,more parent guilt when you set the Netflix slider to four hours just to finish a work report. What I really need are more granular categories. Entertainment currently lumps together YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix. I’m fine with my child listening to Spotify for hours, but not watching YouTube. You can set limits for individual apps, but that quickly becomes overwhelming.

Managing screen time already feels like a full-time job. I’m most eager for the redesigned Screen Time interface, which I hope is far more intuitive than the current maze of Settings menus. I cannot count how many parents have asked me to help enable parental controls on their kids’ devices. When you search “parental controls” in Settings, nothing appears. I wish Apple had made Screen Time a separate app,not just for ease of use, but so I could lock it with Face ID. My daughter regularly sneaks onto my phone to uncheck the Block at End of Limit toggle, a setting buried several menus deep. Raising a tech-savvy teen has its perils.

If Apple wants credit for protecting children from the dangers of excessive screen time, it must start with controls that parents can actually rely on.