| For me it's completely unfit for purpose: * It's incompatible with some apps, e.g. Roblox, that are full-screened, and you end up in an annoying loop between the Roblox screen and the request more time screen fighting with each other, with no ability to click anything. My kid has learned how to hit the Option-Command-Escape shortcut to force-kill Roblox using just the keyboard and restart. * Sometimes Screen Time requests come via Notifications (yay), and sometimes they come via Messages (boo). There doesn't appear to be any logic behind which. * When they come in via Messages, and I leave Messages.app running for too long, it ends up eating all of the memory on my 32GB M1 Max and forcing me to restart the system. * Sometimes requests do not come through at all. * Sometimes the user cannot request more time. Clicking the button does nothing. * Sometimes multiple requests come through for the same app. Approving one of the requests does not satisfy all of them, you have to approve all of them. * Requests for websites do not work. Every so often Roblox breaks and results in having to re-download the .dmg. You end up in a loop between approving the request for more time and the website saying the user needs to request more time. I ended up writing a shell script to curl it instead (which requires munging User-Agent because the Roblox download page does not have a direct link to the dmg). It's clear there are no Apple employees who actually use Screen Time to manage kids time. I can only assume they just let their kids have unlimited access, because trying to actually use Screen Time is absolutely infuriating, and only gets worse over time (e.g. the Notifications vs Messages thing is a recent regression). It's also worth pointing out that I have absolutely zero issues with Android Family Link. It all Just Works for similar purposes. |
Oh this is a good one I forgot. If my kid is playing Roblox and runs out of time, it goes into that screen loop and is impossible to resolve without at least killing Roblox, and sometimes rebooting the silly machine. That's pretty frustrating for the kid for sure, I ended up just whitelisting Roblox so it never happened.