His kid doesn't need a phone and doesn't need to be tracked to walk to school. Get over it.
As a parent I want a phone I can find because kids will lose a phone.
So, Find My is invaluable for locating it again.
Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
41–50 of 268 posts
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#42His kid doesn't need a phone and doesn't need to be tracked to walk to school. Get over it.
Yup, came to say this. Kids have learned to walk places on their own without maps or satnav or tracking for hundreds of thousands of years. I believe everyone would benefit from that continuing. We don't teach kids that the only way to do arithmetic is with a calculator... they learn first, then get a tool that can support what they already know. Why do we think we should do it differently here, and train this learne…
As I parent I am downvoting this because I am quite tired of others judging parents and their technology choices- particularly when it comes to restrictions.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#43'Perfect' being used as a filler word in a headline is obscene to me.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#44Sometimes I imagine that the mandate of one team (like those that build accessibility features) end up at direct odds with the mandate for other teams. And then there’s maybe an internal politicking where it’s like… okay you can have that feature that completely subverts a lot of how we want users to be behaving, but you can’t market it loudly.
I have no clue how things are actually structured at Apple, though. But I’m sure at this level of product maturity, there’s going to be internal struggles between user friendliness and profitability.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#45This seems like a much more comprehensive solution than screen time
ScreenTime is for limiting and monitoring access to certain things for those who can otherwise handle a modern smartphone. Assistive Access is to remove the complexity for those who can't handle it. They are for different use cases, with some overlap in the venn diagram.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#46>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time. I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
That’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#47>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time. I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
A friend was woken up by his young kid trying to surreptitiously lever his finger onto the TouchID sensor to pay for a game dlc.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot. They didn’t give me one. I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan). I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that t…
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#49Mobile Device Management (MDM) is the only effective way to restrict idevices. All you need is a macbook and Apple Configurator. You can remove safari, blacklist or whitelist websites, block installing apps, block deleting apps. It's really customizable. Edit: expanded acronym.
I've used MDM to make my iPhone dumb. It's great! I wish there was an easy way to publish my configuration so others could use it / adapt it, but it's a little involved because you have to wipe your phone the first time you set it up with configurator.
Re: Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
#50> My son only gets Calls, Messages, Maps, Camera (so we can video call, but I've ruthlessly turned off selfies), Photos, and Music. Nothing else. I get that the internet is an addictive scary place with lots of content potentially dangerous to a young person. But why would you care if your child took a selfie? That seems pretty draconian.
Also, it doesn't add up. How would Camera let you video call? Don't you need Facetime?