Apple’s Broken Guardrail System
Did you see Dr. Pletter’s campaign in May 2024 highlighting the small, yet critical problem with Apple’s parental control system? The Beyond the feedback: Calling All iPhone users campaign continues to grow and was recently featured in The Wall Street Journal and US News and World Report. Considering the global push to balance society’s reliance on technology with the growing awareness of its impact on our families, let’s keep going and make even more noise (Apple Feedback link). Applecare (1 (800) 275-2273) repeatedly tells us that they will respond to their customers’ feedback. Let’s fight off the fatigue and apathy and continue to give them overwhelming input; Apple must (and will?) do better to stay at the forefront of innovation for our families and future customers, particularly our kids.
Apple’s parental control system– consisting of Screen Time, Family Sharing, and Ask to Buy– offers parents a way to guardrail their children’s exploration of the online world, but the package is too confusing and buggy to work as promised. Dr. Pletter and others have been calling attention to these problems and basic workarounds for many years. As designed, setting up Family Sharing requires the creation of multiple passwords, IDs, and passcodes, and then it is often unclear when to use each password. Parents who clear that hurdle then face design flaws and bugs undermining the system. For example, Ask to Buy, which is supposed to prevent a child from downloading an app without parental approval, only works the first time that app is downloaded to the child’s device (Note that “buying” applies to free apps like Instagram, Roblox, Minecraft, etc. in this system).
This flaw has a significant impact on our families. If a parent allows their child to download Instagram during vacation, the app can be re-downloaded using iCloud indefinitely. iCloud download makes the deleting and re-downloading of apps so easy that even diligent parents who check their child’s phone daily could easily miss the fact that the kid can download the app on their way to school, use it throughout the day, and delete it on the way home. Turning the App Store on/off is also not a simple alternative as those controls are often unresponsive leaving many families feeling desperate and helpless.
Can anything be done about the problem caused by iCloud downloads? Maybe. (Check out our Youtube tutorial here). According to the Apple support website, hiding purchases should prevent the redownload of shared purchases, however, we’ve seen that sometimes the child can redownload apps without approval from the Ask to Buy System even when purchases are hidden. Although more testing is required, the amount of bugs in this system highlight the need for non-software parenting solutions when guiding a child’s access to the digital world.
-iParent101 Team