You glossed over the most legit complaint raised in the article:

> They search for bugs that make it easy to keep using their phones, unbeknown to parents, like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos. “These are not rocket science, backdoor, dark web sort of hacks,” says Chris McKenna, founder of the Internet safety group Protect Young Eyes. “It blows me away that Apple hasn’t thought through the fact that a persistent middle school boy or girl can bang around and find them.”

And yeah, it’s not that Apple hasn’t thought about this or that fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix.

The issue is Apple only implemented this feature to head off shareholder criticism, not because it believes it. Apple is not incentivized to make its products less addictive.

All those problems are solved by taking the phone away. We got a cordless phone when I was a kid (yeah I'm old), and it didn't take long before every night my mom or dad came around and made sure the phone was on the base.

I also played a lot of video games, and if I played more than a couple of hours in a row my dad would come and just unplug the Nintendo. Drove me nuts (saved games on those old cartridges were very finicky), but it made me go outside.

See, I agree with this mentality. I would actually respect Apple a lot if they had just come out and told parents to "just take the phone away" rather than launching a half implemented feature and then forgetting about it.

Unfortunately there's no way that would ever happen. Even if Apple PR would ever allow such a statement to be made, which it wouldn't, requiring parents to do some actual parenting might provoke major unrest.

You're saying this, but you have no actual evidence about why Apple implemented this feature and also zero insight into what incentivizes Apple.

> you have no actual evidence about why Apple implemented this feature

You mean, other than what is clearly explained in the article?

“In early 2018, a pair of major shareholders urged Apple’s board of directors to do something about youth screen addiction... Nine months later, Apple launched Screen Time”

> and also zero insight into what incentivizes Apple

Would you care to provide any counter evidence or insights of your own, or do you generally prefer defending your position via ad hominen attacks?

I can't weigh in on Apple's internal process, but that explanation you quoted from the article is far from convincing to me. In fact, having been in the industry for a very long time, it makes the whole article smell pretty naive.

It's _extremely_ unlikely that Screen Time went from nothing to launch in nine months. It's a deceptively complex feature that requires support throughout the OS as well its own foreground and background components. Between product design, prioritizing, development, and testing, they'd probably been exploring the idea for several _years_ before that shareholder pressure appeared.

Did they maybe rush the work out early because of the growing pressure? I'd buy that. To me, being pressured to rush it out would even explain some of the rough edges discussed in the article without having to assume Apple was reluctant.

I can't know if I'm right, but neither can you or the article's authors. It turns out that there are quite a few ways to make sense of all the facts that are out there, and any final conclusions we draw probably just emerge from our own biases.

Do you actually think Screen Time, a feature with deep, pervasive integration all through the operating system, was completed in 9 months?

From the article: “In one day, I’m confident Apple could clean up all these loopholes,” he said.

From your comment: "fixing these kinds of bugs would take more than a day or few to fix"

No way it's that easy. These hacks span multiple apps, factory resets, etc.

Also, this is all expected - just like all other parts of internet security, it's going to be a cycle of hacks and patches.

> No way it's that easy. These hacks span multiple apps, factory resets, etc.

You seem to have missed the first line of my comment about these not being hacks but straight up obvious bugs "like changing the time to trick the system, or using iMessage to watch YouTube videos".

no, i didn't.

I’m not even sure these are bugs. For example, if you restrict movie viewing, but allow mail or iMessages, and a (mail) message contains a video, should the phone show it, or not?

There’s a fairly complex interaction between Screen Time (settings controlling how often various features can be used), Down Time (settings controlling when various features can be used), Restrictions (settings controlling which settings the user of the device can change), various convenience features that pierce holes in that (ability to make photographs/send messages from the home screen, for example), and various cross-app capabilities (it wouldn’t surprise me if iBooks could be made to play videos inside e-books, for example) that, IMO, make it non-trivial to implement this in a way that makes it work perfectly as Parental Controls without leading to “but why doesn’t this work? I told the phone that application X was permitted” surprises.

If I enabled Screen Time for myself, the best answer might be ‘yes’. If I enabled it for my kid, it might be ‘no’.

I mean, yeah, like anything there are a million weird edge cases that would take time to code around if you needed 100% coverage. But changing system time and trying to view a video in the core messaging app on the phone, which is marketed as being able to handle video, does not seem to qualify is next level hacking. These are obvious use cases.

I would argue that Apple is deliberately not fixing these holes because they prefer having people hooked on their devices. I'm not arguing that this is a good or bad thing, merely that higher engagement is obviously good for business.

Apple seems to have found the balance it wants with its current solution - paying lip service to the vocal shareholders, while allowing its customers to easily work around the restrictions.

Great points. Clearly nobody at Apple or Google working on these kinds of features is a parent. There are so many big misses.

> Clearly nobody at Apple or Google working on these kinds of features is a parent.

That’s highly unlikely given the number of people working there.

Clearly you haven’t done professional software development before. There are so many big misses.

The misses I’m referring to are fundamental product management blind spots. One doesn’t see this kind of thing when those designing the product have any familiarity with the use cases involved.

It’s as if they designed a food delivery app and forgot to let the user enter the delivery address.

The kind of changes that Screen Time requires spans the entire platform, which means that it can only be developed incrementally. It’s inevitably going to take years before all the “obvious” loopholes are closed, but it’s not because of some design flaw on Apple’s part.

Not true. The misses are due to the perverse incentives and myopia created by both companies’ monetization strategies. For instance, a child must have an iCloud or gmail account to use the parental control features of each platform, and iOS users can’t whitelist content for YouTube kids except by taking the kid’s device.

YouTube kids is a load of algorithmic content farm generated garbage. There is no trust based system for ranking content by quality (pagerank anyone?). Apple parental control is category specific, limits cannot be set for individual apps, nor can ad hoc categories be created.

Netflix has the same perverse incentives that default to the most addictive, garbage content and no whitelist option. Totally irresponsible and greed driven.

All three companies are dragging their feet, it is hard to tell if it’s due to greed, negligence or both.

Sadly, Amazon is the market leader in 2019 for kid friendly content and parental control options.

Smart phone addiction is absolutely real. My neck is sore everyday that I don't consciously make an effort to use my phone less. I hit my 1 hour limit on my reddit app by 9 or 10 every morning.

I do agree that it is absolutely not Apple's responsibility to do anything about this. People want to outsource their responsibility as parents and it's pathetic.

Parents can’t hover over their kids 24/7. Moreover, I’d question whether having your time micromanaged in such a way by a parent wouldn’t cause resentment and arguments.

A technological solution seems perfectly reasonable in that context - and Apple has blocked some third party apps from the store so putting more of an onus on them to fill in the missing capabilities seems reasonable.

The parents who don’t want to parent are probably perfectly happy handing youtube to their kids and not monitoring or managing the usage at all.

But Apple has taken some responsibility for this by knocking out third party MDM apps that served this purpose (like OurPact) and then replacing it with a half-finished piece of work that suffers from multiple usability problems.

As a parent, I'm taking responsibility for my kids' time and development by making sure the Skinner box is turned off until homework and chores are completed. I don't feel that's outsourcing my work as a parent - it's just one more tool in my toolbox among many.

You may disagree and you're raising your own kids differently, and that's just fine.

Parents need functional tools. Apple providing broken tools is counter-productive to empowering parents to take responsibility.

Or you know, physically keep the phone from the children.

The minute we can find a book that replicates a Skinner box, you may be onto something. I agree that yes, just being on your phone isn't a terrible thing, but it's not really comparable to books just because of its ability to provide more effective, immediate, and addictive feedback.

I've done reading where my varying enjoyment of different parts was essentially intermittent rewards.

How exactly do minecraft videos on youtube replicate a skinner box?

That's not, but any of the mobile games will be doing their best to replicate the same behaviours, and social media gives fleeting dopamine hits.

They give some level of pleasure that the person wants to recreate. Watch another one new to get another hit of pleasure. Repeat.

>This is a bit of an inflammatory comparison

Fair enough, you admitted it at least.

>but I stayed up reading with a flashlight a lot as a kid. Was that terrible for me? Should my flashlight have had a setting to limit the times I can use it? Would anyone say I had an unhealthy book addiction, and that publishers should do something about it?

Did it mess with your cognitive abilities? Your self-esteem? Your self-image? Your limbic system, in general? No? Your dopamine receptors, then? Did it fill every minute of your waking life with escapism? Would anyone read while driving? Or during class, meals, family gatherings, dates, meetings, at the movies? You get the point.

I think the unhealthy potential of smartphones differs tremendously from that of books, just because of their inherent physical qualities and limitations.

I’ve definitely had books do all of those things for me, have definitely read in most of those situations.

It’s not Apple’s job to parent my kids, but it is Apple’s job to provide access control features (screen time) to admins (parents) that work and can’t be circumvented.

Imagine how silly I would sound if I said “It’s not Apple’s job to sysadmin your users” in response to priceless not working properly on user accounts.

So while parenting support, or whatever, isn’t that important to me, functioning audit and access controls really is.

> it's not like they're watching porn

Unpopular opinion: I would be less preoccupied of a teen watching porn at 2am than on watching clips of videogames