Lending your Apple device to your kids

Sometimes my daughter asks to use my phone when she is super bored, waiting for a dentist appointment or in any other situation. I don’t mind letting her use my phone, but the other day a friend of mine told me his daughter started sending pics (nothing special about the photo itself, only silly selfies) thinking she was sending them to her mom but it was sent to a coworker instead.

I can see more situations such as deleting apps or using an app you don’t want them to use. The point is, I use a native feature that I don’t think most parents know about it, it’s called “Guided Access” and the way it works is that you can open the app your child wants to use, triple-click the side button and start a session where only that app is allowed to be used (you can also set options such as time, auto-lock etc.

The way to use this feature is:

1. Go to Settings > Accessibility, then turn on Guided Access;
2. Tap Passcode Settings, then tap Set Guided Access Passcode (that you’ll need to unlock later, you can use the same passcode of your device);
3. Open the app that you want and on an iPhone X or later, triple-click the side button. On an iPhone 8 or earlier, triple-click the Home button;
4. Tap Guided Access, then tap Start;
5. When you get your device back, triple-click the Side or Home button, enter your Guided Access passcode, then tap End.

That’s it. There are more options that you can explore, but this is good enough for most cases for me.

Cheers!