Disregarding the voice and video requirements, a private Minecraft server or Realm is a pretty decent space for kids to hang out and let their creativity run wild.

10 or so years ago when Minecraft was coming out of beta, I was a precocious enough child to run a server on some spare hardware lying around the house. (Realms wasn't a thing until like 2014)

Good times were had between my friends and I, but that all changed after I started becoming intoxicated by the power. Whoops.

Give it a try, but I advise against giving a literal child the ability to ban people. I would know.

Thanks, I'd not thought of a minecraft server, most of his friends play it so it could be an option for txt chatting. I'll try spinning one up at the weekend to see how it works.

Our kids do Minecraft on their iPads; the official Microsoft Realms seems to work a little better than the servers I used to stand up, especially when some of the kids they play with are using PCs and XBoxes. It’s ~$8 a month, which is more than it should be, but still not ridiculous.

The kids usually start a voice FaceTime group chat and then start up Minecraft, which keeps the voice chat going in the background. It works great. (If they are playing with someone that doesn’t use FaceTime: I’m pretty sure that the Facebook Messenger for Kids app also works)

I’ll also put in a plug for the Apple Watch cellular - we have them for the kids using the family setup. The kids then have a phone without having a phone, they have the blue iMessage bubble in chat, etc. But no camera, no bad social apps, etc. And you can have them delegate management of their address book to your phone and then set the watch to ignore everything except contacts in the address book. A side benefit is that each watch is $10 a month instead of the $30-50 per month a real phone costs.