I love Apple products. I worked for Apple for many years as a software engineer, and fully bought into their ecosystem of devices and services. When we had kids, they got their own iPads and eventually iMacs and AirPods, and listened to Apple Music. Our oldest got an iPhone. We used the Screen Time feature to limit the time they spent on their devices (except on road trips and airplanes) and to protect them from dangerous content. We could seamlessly stay connected with iMessage, FaceTime, and FindMy. We were happy customers, until one of our kids developed a serious social media addiction.

In hindsight, I’m not even sure how he got Snapchat, since I don’t have any memory of approving it. It was during the pandemic, and initially we were inclined to let him stay connected with his friends. He spent an increasing amount of time on Snapchat, until it was almost every minute that he was at home, up to 9-10 hours a day. His grades started slipping, his behavior and demeanor worsened, and he started making references to self-harm. 

I wondered how he could spend 9-10 hours on Snapchat when he was supposed to be limited to 2 hours of screen time. I figured he was somehow cheating, so I read up on hacks, and implemented all the fixes I could find. I locked his settings to prevent changing the time zone, and I rotated his passcode weekly to a new random 4-digit number, but still he was able to use Snapchat freely. I tried adding a screen time limit specifically for Snapchat, but that didn’t help. One night I looked at his device long after his downtime had started, and noticed that Snapchat was still available, along with TikTok – other apps were disabled as expected. For months I spent countless hours on this, reading comments and potential solutions on Apple’s support forums or Reddit, and experimenting with different settings. Eventually I installed the Bark app, but by that time he was proficient enough to disable the VPN and avoid its controls.

Finally, I took away his iPhone and got him a Bark phone. He was furious at first and refused to use it, even threatening to destroy it, but after realizing we weren’t going to change our minds, he relented and accepted it. And it worked. His screen time is now reliably limited to two hours daily (one hour on Snapchat), and all his apps are disabled after his bedtime routine starts at 9 pm.

Our younger son recently started playing Roblox on his iPad, and we noticed the same issues as with Snapchat – it doesn’t respect screen time limits or down time. I don’t want to go down the same destructive path with another kid, so I ordered a Samsung Galaxy tablet to replace his iPad. Google’s parental controls work as expected. 

I don’t know whether our kids have found hacks that we don’t know about (in the case of our younger one, I really doubt it), or whether Snapchat, Roblox, and TikTok have found a way to avoid Apple’s screen time limits (I fully believe they are evil and would if they could), or whether Apple is simply not investing in testing and fixing Screen Time (having seen from the inside how ruthlessly Apple prioritizes, this is possible). In the end, it doesn’t matter. The buck stops with Apple, and they failed to protect my kids. I will continue using Apple devices personally, for now, but my kids will grow up as Android users.