Long back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
1. It’s incredibly slow to transition in and out of the mode, as mentioned in the article, which made setting it up (constant tweaks) very painful
2. For messages and calls, you were limited to select contacts only. So I couldn’t just text/call a number when I needed to.
They may have polished the feature since then, but given that it’s an Accessibility feature and was never meant to receive much attention in this regard, it may always be half-baked.
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.
MDM is the worst part of iOS. It undermines all of apple’s security claims, basically making iOS windows. Devices should not be able to be remotely controlled.
MDM enables enterprises to control how the phones they own behave. If anything it makes it more secure, if an enterprise were to only allow allowlisted apps to run on it.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
it is not just simplified, it lets you chose which apps to show in that "simplified" view. For the elderly, that removes a lot of clutter and ways to shot yourself in the foot.
I really wish settings could be downloaded and implemented like transferring Bookmarks in browsers. That way I could take a setup of settings someone has created and simply mimic that by way of adopting all of the same settings in one fell swoop.
It would break the anxiety barrier of having to finagle with a bunch of different settings which exists for a lot of people believe it or not.Or Apple could just make it easier to implement these types of features much easier.
>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 found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
When kids break the rules about screen time, there are consequences.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
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 technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’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 was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
They’re talking about the relative ineffectiveness of prohibition when it comes to teenagers. Generally speaking, they’re right. And the implication is therefore “don’t just blanket ban your way through screen time restrictions.”
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
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.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
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.
Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
I like the feature, but I don't like the assumption at the beginning.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
you should be having words with people who would turn to violence on such a short fuse then, not me and my comment that didn't even say anything about anyone elses kids
Oh, it's a very long list. It could be anywhere actually, by "place" I didn't mean something like a specific city, but more of a place in a city where that situation would most likely unfold.
Anyway, I don't want to derail the conversation too much, this is a very interesting topic but it is off-topic.
If you want to keep talking about it send me an email! Info on my profile :).
Kids are living beings. If people don't want to hear about how they paint their car that's one thing. But if they don't want to hear any comments on how they treat a fellow human that's very concerning
I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.
Well, it is a pretty American thing for this to be the case. Americans have been arrested for letting kids walk 500 meters on their own before (in certain neighborhoods)
And I've been where the Americans had some friends over from the US, and the 11/12 year olds grabbed some rifles and said they'd be back tomorrow. The Americans barely noticed, the Europeans flipped.
America is big, and parts of it can be very different.
This stuff truly makes my head spin. How do these people think humanity came to be, to today? Do they understand we in historically safe times? I thought the pendulum was swinging back on helicopter parents but some adults, some HN adults, have more money and tech-bias than common sense, or self-awareness, or any awareness of what they're doing to the children. And then remarking that they get around those restrictions. DUH?! Jesus, do some people here struggle this much to remember their own childhoods???
Only issue is that kids going outside alone has become highly stigmatized in society to the point where doing so gets you jailed and charged[0].
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
This looks perfect! I had been searching around for “feature phones” but the market seems dire. Lots of carrier locked devices or devices that still offer “a little bit of internet”. And then I started thinking about finding a repair shop when my kid inevitably breaks it and an old iPhone keeps looking better and better.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
This is actually a really great feature for everyone else trying to reduce their phone use without switching to different "dumbphone". But why mandatory lock by passcode? I agree, that adding more friction would prevent user to switch back to standard UI, but still - it should be optional.
This might be just the thing for my elderly mother. She's used an iPhone for many many years, but struggles lately with motor dexterity, vision, and a bit of cognitive challenge making phone usage difficult. Lots of things I'd like to just hide she doesn't need to get to (like Settings).
In the exact same boat with my mother in law at the moment. I was thinking of getting her one of those android for elderly phones but wanted to see if I could do something with her existing iphone first. At this point, anything that is recognizable is a plus so sticking with the iPhone will help there.
I keep observing that accessibility features often contain the tools we need to make our devices and apps more humane. This is one area that video games have been way ahead on.
Sometimes 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.
> Crucially, this is where, unlike with Apple’s standard child screen-time restrictions, you can choose to completely block internet browsing by simply not allowing Safari
Very odd take given that you can block access to safari with iOS screen time as well...
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 learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
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.
Way I see it, most parents give their kids early access to phones just to keep them sedated and occupied. There is zero benefit for under 14yo to have unrestricted access to the smartphone or internet. It only benefits the parents.
It's so damn easy to hit "pause" on the kid by turning on the TV or handing over a phone, but the result is so apparent: demands for more phone or more TV.
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.
There is an entire ecosystem of kid's watches which do exactly that. Pretty much just a miniature cellphone with restricted functions that goes on the wrist like some sort of a tracking collar.
While all one needz in such case is new commodore (yes, that commodore) flip phone.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.
>Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
Archived https://archive.is/LV6Cw
Long back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
They may have polished the feature since then, but given that it’s an Accessibility feature and was never meant to receive much attention in this regard, it may always be half-baked.
now that it has received attention, Apple might just throw another engineer at it :)
#2 seems like a feature, not a bug. I certainly don't want my 11 year old texting/calling unapproved numbers, way too young for that.
I just tested #2 on iOS 27 Developer Beta, and this has been resolved. You can select “anyone” instead of specific contacts.
Mobile 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.
What does the acronym stand for
mobile device management
Mobile Device Management
MDM is just parental control for adults.
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.
I did that when I had an iPhone, I agree it was excellent. More people should do it.
Looking forward to MDM support on GrapheneOS.
MDM is the worst part of iOS. It undermines all of apple’s security claims, basically making iOS windows. Devices should not be able to be remotely controlled.
It can be done all locally. How can an optional feature that's not even easy to use be the worst part of iOS?
Yeah, no - if I provide my employees $1000 devices, I most certainly would like to be able to exercise some sort of management over them.
> making iOS windows
Baseless claims.
MDM enables enterprises to control how the phones they own behave. If anything it makes it more secure, if an enterprise were to only allow allowlisted apps to run on it.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
Summary:
Simplify the iPhone home screen with large icons for kids or seniors:
Settings > Accessibility > General section at the very bottom > Assistive Access
it is not just simplified, it lets you chose which apps to show in that "simplified" view. For the elderly, that removes a lot of clutter and ways to shot yourself in the foot.
> 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.
I'm speculating that it's not the selfie; it's where that selfie ends up (or with whom).
OP apparently still hasn't learned that the kids today are taking selfies "blind" using the rear camera.
I do this myself (albeit pretty rarely) since the rear camera is significantly better than the front camera, especially in low light.
Your comment led me to the Insta360 device that makes it easy to take selfies with the main camera:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/907670/insta360-snap-usb-c-mag...
Second screen: provided by USB-C screencast and accessibility settings for to support touch. Image of device: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...
Also, it doesn't add up. How would Camera let you video call? Don't you need Facetime?
I really wish settings could be downloaded and implemented like transferring Bookmarks in browsers. That way I could take a setup of settings someone has created and simply mimic that by way of adopting all of the same settings in one fell swoop.
It would break the anxiety barrier of having to finagle with a bunch of different settings which exists for a lot of people believe it or not.Or Apple could just make it easier to implement these types of features much easier.
That's exactly what configuration profiles are for. They work on macOS, iOS, tvOS etc. and you can configure them with a GUI app from Apple (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-or-remove-con...)
>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.
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
Try discipline
No one asked.
curious kind of discipline you have in mind.
Time-honored punishment: revoke various privileges for periods of time until they get it.
In this case, seems pretty topical to just take the phone away entirely for a few days.
When kids break the rules about screen time, there are consequences.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
Children don't have fully formed brains. There's a wildly varying ceiling on the efficacy of discipline.
I've concluded the only way to avoid workarounds it to reduce my own screen time. I stopped having a tablet myself. Got off the Iphone too.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
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 technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’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 was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
I don’t think “one can get around rules” is a very insightful thing to say, it’s just a truism.
They’re talking about the relative ineffectiveness of prohibition when it comes to teenagers. Generally speaking, they’re right. And the implication is therefore “don’t just blanket ban your way through screen time restrictions.”
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
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.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
Is that black hat or white hat?
Chaotic hat
Who said it had to be unfettered?
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
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.
Adversarially train the children, rlai works on human brains too?
My childhood was filled with increasing escalations of restrictions to both the computer and the network, and my workarounds.
Excellent education
That’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
Dude. 80’s kids think of FAT32 as that new filesystem that supports more than 8.3.
You guys had filesystems??
Nope, just fat. ;)
HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE you mean :-)
We were once 1337 hackers too
Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
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.
LMAO incredible
Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
You are teaching your children to be even more secretive and hide things from you even better.
Great. They are learning good security culture. That will be useful later in life when every move they make will be surveilled.
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
Assistive access is the feature being referred to by tfa
I like the feature, but I don't like the assumption at the beginning.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
the idea of tagging my kid with a tracker like they're a wild bird being tracked is repugnant
Just a suggestion, be more mindful when you make comments involving other people's kids.
(which is generally a no-no unless you're invited to)
On the internet is fine, but I've been to places around the world where a comment like that would result in black eyes, missing teeth, etc.
What did they actually say about some's kida?
Knocking out someones teeth would necessitate filing charges
Oh, absolutely! I would just prefer to avoid all of that.
you should be having words with people who would turn to violence on such a short fuse then, not me and my comment that didn't even say anything about anyone elses kids
I'm very curious as to what places of the world that would be.
Oh, it's a very long list. It could be anywhere actually, by "place" I didn't mean something like a specific city, but more of a place in a city where that situation would most likely unfold.
Anyway, I don't want to derail the conversation too much, this is a very interesting topic but it is off-topic.
If you want to keep talking about it send me an email! Info on my profile :).
Eh, people who write about their parenting in the internet are opening it for comments
Kids are living beings. If people don't want to hear about how they paint their car that's one thing. But if they don't want to hear any comments on how they treat a fellow human that's very concerning
We had some friends over last form the US. One 11 yr kid in the group was bored and said: ok I’m gonna go home now, I need the keys please.
He walked home by himself - maybe 500 meters… For us Europeans it was nothing to notice really, but the Americans were absolutely shocked.
I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.
Well, it is a pretty American thing for this to be the case. Americans have been arrested for letting kids walk 500 meters on their own before (in certain neighborhoods)
And I've been where the Americans had some friends over from the US, and the 11/12 year olds grabbed some rifles and said they'd be back tomorrow. The Americans barely noticed, the Europeans flipped.
America is big, and parts of it can be very different.
This stuff truly makes my head spin. How do these people think humanity came to be, to today? Do they understand we in historically safe times? I thought the pendulum was swinging back on helicopter parents but some adults, some HN adults, have more money and tech-bias than common sense, or self-awareness, or any awareness of what they're doing to the children. And then remarking that they get around those restrictions. DUH?! Jesus, do some people here struggle this much to remember their own childhoods???
Only issue is that kids going outside alone has become highly stigmatized in society to the point where doing so gets you jailed and charged[0].
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
0: https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/is-it-a-crime-to-let-you...
Side note: As above article states, after this arrest SB110 was passed to specifically outline what is reasonable for this situation.
This looks perfect! I had been searching around for “feature phones” but the market seems dire. Lots of carrier locked devices or devices that still offer “a little bit of internet”. And then I started thinking about finding a repair shop when my kid inevitably breaks it and an old iPhone keeps looking better and better.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
This is actually a really great feature for everyone else trying to reduce their phone use without switching to different "dumbphone". But why mandatory lock by passcode? I agree, that adding more friction would prevent user to switch back to standard UI, but still - it should be optional.
This might be just the thing for my elderly mother. She's used an iPhone for many many years, but struggles lately with motor dexterity, vision, and a bit of cognitive challenge making phone usage difficult. Lots of things I'd like to just hide she doesn't need to get to (like Settings).
In the exact same boat with my mother in law at the moment. I was thinking of getting her one of those android for elderly phones but wanted to see if I could do something with her existing iphone first. At this point, anything that is recognizable is a plus so sticking with the iPhone will help there.
It's still a smartphone.
The perfect dumb phone is just a dumb phone. (Bonus, they're an order of magnitude cheaper than a decent smartphone).
'Perfect' being used as a filler word in a headline is obscene to me.
I keep observing that accessibility features often contain the tools we need to make our devices and apps more humane. This is one area that video games have been way ahead on.
Sometimes 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.
> Crucially, this is where, unlike with Apple’s standard child screen-time restrictions, you can choose to completely block internet browsing by simply not allowing Safari
Very odd take given that you can block access to safari with iOS screen time as well...
It's like At Ease for mobile. Neat!
His 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 learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
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.
Yeah, but your kid can also walk to school without a map, it's not a big deal.
Way I see it, most parents give their kids early access to phones just to keep them sedated and occupied. There is zero benefit for under 14yo to have unrestricted access to the smartphone or internet. It only benefits the parents.
It's so damn easy to hit "pause" on the kid by turning on the TV or handing over a phone, but the result is so apparent: demands for more phone or more TV.
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.
The kid doesn't need it, but the parents need the kid to have it on him to appease the bored onlookers one digit away from calling the authorities.
This 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.
For some reason when I opened this the sound of a helicopter hovering shook the walls.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own.
*THE HORROR*
> But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it.
Uhhhhhhhhh. The way this is stated so plainly as if it were self-evident fact is telling. The author longs for the umbilical cord.
> but what if he gets lost?
What if he learns a life lesson, navigation and/or some form of self-reliance or independence?
I just... no wonder Kids Today are so cooked.
While living in Japan, our kid used a cellphone with 3 buttons.
1. Call mom, 2. Call dad. 3. Call Auntie.
These kid's phones were very common, inexpensive and worked great.
There is an entire ecosystem of kid's watches which do exactly that. Pretty much just a miniature cellphone with restricted functions that goes on the wrist like some sort of a tracking collar.
"You must disable SIM PIN to enable Assistive Access..."
Also refuses to activate with alphanumeric passcode enabled..
I could sort of imagine plausible reasons for that, but not allowing sim pin seems… nonobvious.
While all one needz in such case is new commodore (yes, that commodore) flip phone.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.
>Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.