The Wall Street Journal has reported that Apple is aware of a bug in the Screen Time parental controls that causes settings not to stick and plans to fix it. It said parents who remotely scheduled off-limits time and restricted apps found that the settings were not sticking.
For a bit of background, Apple said it had fixed an issue related to Screen Time in iOS 16.5, which came out in May. The Wall Street Journal found, however, that the bug has not actually been fixed, even in the latest iOS 17 beta.
The news outlet said that the specific feature that was affected was Downtime. It’s a feature that lets parents choose the hours their kids can use their Apple devices. Due to the bug, the times parents were scheduling were reverting to previous settings, and in some cases, there were no restrictions at all.
In a pretty vague response, an Apple spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal that:
‘We are aware that some users may be experiencing an issue where Screen Time settings are unexpectedly reset. We take these reports very seriously and we have been, and will continue, making updates to improve the situation.’
It’s unclear if this means the fix will be deployed with the next version of iOS or some later version. The problem seems to be widespread and affecting many parents, so they’ll be hoping it’s deployed sooner rather than later.
One workaround that parents can use while they wait for Apple to fix the issue is to set screen limits directly on their children’s devices. While it can be a hassle to set up the feature on multiple devices, the settings you choose should stick.
Do you use these features on your kid’s devices? Have you noticed any problems recently? Due to the settings being reverted silently, you may have missed entirely that this was happening.
Source: The Wall Street Journal