[sebgan]

We got phones for our kids primarily to keep in touch when they are away, especially when they have after school sports, at work (yes, even at 14 they can have gainful employment opportunities like reffing soccer). It would be great if the "smart" phone had a true "dumb" mode where the phone basically becomes a Nokia Blue vintage talk / text device. Not an app you have to install, but something that is part of the OS which I, as the parent, can control.

[Vegenoid]

Does iOS not have pretty robust parental controls and locks? I ask this seriously, to see if any parents have experience locking down iPhones against a motivated adversary (their child) within the last few years.

[dmart]

No. Screen Time (their parental controls implementation) is easily circumventable, includes a “One More Minute” feature that can’t be disabled, doesn’t sync properly, manages to crash Safari in mysterious ways… I could go on. It’s disastrous, like an intern-level project that was shipped and never improved upon. And these are the only parental controls APIs available, so competing apps aren’t even possible, they ultimately just serve as alternate frontends for Screen Time.

[sensanaty]

You can just buy them a dumb phone? No reason they need a smartphone just for messages and calls

[AngryData]

You can kind of get away with it, but even with just SMS you are losing a significant amount of flexibility that effects how much and what people are messaging you and is the exact reason why I stopped using a dumb phone. People sending pictures or emojis or to ask a question pointing to a link. People get tired of you asking what the hell they just sent you, whether it was a picture, or just a reaction with an emoji, because often both will fail to display right or at all.

[sebgan]

True, and we considered that. But there are benefits to a smart phone that we also wanted them to have, just not all the time, and it should be easier to make a smart phone dumb than the other way around.