You can’t even block YouTube on your kids devices because Screen Time doesn’t see that YT is installed.

A known bug for years now.

Then good luck getting the time limits to work. It’ll tell the kids “5 minutes left!” then just let them keep going.

That’s odd as I do that quite successfully with my kids.

Parental controls are far superior to Microsoft and epic.

And then Google intentionally makes it hard to filter their stuff, too. I can ostensibly enforce YouTube limits on my Firewalla, but if I try to do that, it basically ends up blocking Google altogether. Because Google serves up some YouTube assets from google.com. I doubt very much this is by accident.

I've used 3 Apple products for more than chance interactions. A MacSE for 5 years in school, a 2015 Mac desktop for 6 months in a printshop, and an iPad for the past 2 years at work.

The SE and desktop felt like modern machines, clicks and key presses had predictable results, applications did what you told them too. On par with the Win95 and Win 7/8 I was used to at the time.

Jesus Christ, that iPad on the other hand, feels like janky Windows Vista tech rammed together by an intern. Weird UI artifacts, making the same gesture can have unpredictable results, the only function that everyone in the shop found without failure was 'undo' because it is triggered by violent shaking.

Even simple tasks like sharing a photo saved from a website is bizarrely broken. Depending on whether you saved it as a file or 'to your photos' dictates which applications can then open/share the image. And I know Android is full of it's own foibles but they took a few months to internalize. I'm going on 2 years of 'features' breaking workflow, and pixel perfect taps to activate input elements that are 5% of the screen width.

/rant

Maybe you are right, but Apple is selling hundreds of millions of iPads per year, so just maybe most people are content with the hard- and software and will just adapt to some quirks.

I am personally not always happy with the gestures, but some can be disabled. I don't have much use for my iPad apart from watching some videos, for everything that requires concentration, I will fallback to my laptop. I still think it is a marvelous machine how the hardware and iPadOS play together.

[delayed]

Yeah the iPad suffers from trying to live on the OS made for phones. I have an iPad but rarely use it any more, and then only for viewing content. It would be far more useful if I could use it with something closer to MacOS.

Our family has struggled with Screen Time a lot. I have come to the conclusion that it's actually beneficial for Apple to keep Screen Time as crappy as it is. That allows kids to use their iPhones more. That's good viral marketing in a very lucrative demographic and it drives up AppStore sales, micro transactions and engagement rate.

It's a dangerous game to play, though. The more it frustrates me, the more likely I am to consider alternatives when I want a new phone. They might well score a tactical win but a strategic failure.

Screen Time has had many improvements recently; I'd suggest giving it another shot with iOS 27.

No one, probably not even Facebook, intentionally ships crappy software to farm engagement numbers with kids at this point. That's a good way to get hauled up in front of congress and yelled at in a bipartisan fashion, which no company wants.