Member-only story
The Baffling Omission From Apple iOS Screen Time
Apple’s goal to actively encourage screen time
I am heavily invested in the Apple ecosystem and have watched it evolve over time. Coincidentally, as my kids started to get their own apple devices, family sharing and screen time also came into being.
These are great features in theory and awareness of your screen time (and potential to enable restrictions) is an essential ingredient to a healthy relationship with our devices, for adults as well as children.
So Apple’s omission of one simple but key feature is utterly baffling until you realise their real goal.
Search the internet for how-to’s on managing kids screen times and you find thousands of articles explaining how to limit individual app usage or using the downtime feature to set fixed periods of time offline. But none tell you how to set an overall device time limit. Even when contacting Apple Support they confirmed that it just can’t do it. Let’s look at why this is a problem and why apple might just be doing this deliberately.
Screen Time is great if you want to limit individual app usage (i.e. 30mins of YouTube per day). You can even set app categories such as “Games” which apply the limit to all apps within that category, but importantly only individually, not…
