This is a great example of the curb cut effect -- a system designed for accessibility needs turns out to be useful in other contexts. Curb cuts were designed for people with disabilities, particularly veterans, and over time have become more and more standard. They help people who use wheelchairs, yes, but also people without disabilities like those with strollers, bikes, luggage, or small kids.
We love to see accessibility features find uses outside their original intent.
I've used MDM to make my iPhone dumb. It's great! I wish there was an easy way to publish my configuration so others could use it / adapt it, but it's a little involved because you have to wipe your phone the first time you set it up with configurator.
Supervised devices cannot be backed up and restored to supervised devices. You can only backup/restore to an unsupervised target. If you want supervision, you have to abandon your backup.
MDM is the worst part of iOS. It undermines all of apple’s security claims, basically making iOS windows. Devices should not be able to be remotely controlled.
MDM is designed for corporate owned phone environments where there's a great many good reasons to lock down a phone. If you're handing out company owned phones to employees you want the ability to remotely lock/wipe, install and remove apps, set a number of restrictions. If people want to do anything else they are completely welcome to do it on their own personally owned property.
For instance I have recently seen a very successful Apple MDM deployment in a school environment where the teachers and staff have access to a great depth and breadth of PII of a thousand children under age 16. You don't want all those phones to become a free-for-all of people doing whatever they want.
MDM enables enterprises to control how the phones they own behave. If anything it makes it more secure, if an enterprise were to only allow allowlisted apps to run on it.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
I assume they can spy on anything, that's why I refuse to do any kind of BYOD that requires MDM enrollment. It's also one IT mistake away from wiping out my personal data from my own property.
Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.
The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.
Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.
And then some colleagues even paid out-of-pocket to upgrade their Android phones once IT dictated their OS were out of support. No way.
Nonsense. MDM is usually for devices owned by the company or opt in by you personally. There is no way to attack or transparently MDM a personal phone that I know of.
Long back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
it is not just simplified, it lets you chose which apps to show in that "simplified" view. For the elderly, that removes a lot of clutter and ways to shot yourself in the foot.
The article doesn't emphasize it, but Assisted Access also adds back the home/back button, like older iPhones and Androids. There is no more swipe-up motion that I see my parents struggle with because they did it too slow or started from slightly too high on the screen.
I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons (gotta maximize that screen real estate), but the affordance for an obvious home/reset button is great for some people.
> I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons
It was more of design decision than practical one. My phone has a taller screen than 16:9 so when I watch videos there are black bars on the sides anyway - although my previous phone had aspect ratio perfectly matching the cinema one, making movies truly full-screen (minus rounded corners and the front camera). When I'm doing literally anything else, the buttons are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Some of my friends use gestures and actually that does give them extra screen space, but IMO gestures are less convenient and totally not worth it.
But when you show this on a demo it does look neat, especially with a game.
My first phone that had a (rear) camera 20 years ago also had a chrome-plated mirror thing to help us take selfies. I guess nobody called them selfies then.
I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.
Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.
I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
1. It’s incredibly slow to transition in and out of the mode, as mentioned in the article, which made setting it up (constant tweaks) very painful
2. For messages and calls, you were limited to select contacts only. So I couldn’t just text/call a number when I needed to.
They may have polished the feature since then, but given that it’s an Accessibility feature and was never meant to receive much attention in this regard, it may always be half-baked.
Eh I’ve filed a few bugs a few years ago and they seem to have been ignored. I tried it for a while and it crashed my phone frequently. My gut says it’s a hack, hence the performance issues.
I like the feature, but I don't like the assumption at the beginning.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
Only issue is that kids going outside alone has become highly stigmatized in society to the point where doing so gets you jailed and charged[0].
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
Kids are living beings. If people don't want to hear about how they paint their car that's one thing. But if they don't want to hear any comments on how they treat a fellow human that's very concerning
you should be having words with people who would turn to violence on such a short fuse then, not me and my comment that didn't even say anything about anyone elses kids
Oh, it's a very long list. It could be anywhere actually, by "place" I didn't mean something like a specific city, but more of a place in a city where that situation would most likely unfold.
Anyway, I don't want to derail the conversation too much, this is a very interesting topic but it is off-topic.
If you want to keep talking about it send me an email! Info on my profile :).
And I've been where the Americans had some friends over from the US, and the 11/12 year olds grabbed some rifles and said they'd be back tomorrow. The Americans barely noticed, the Europeans flipped.
America is big, and parts of it can be very different.
I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.
Well, it is a pretty American thing for this to be the case. Americans have been arrested for letting kids walk 500 meters on their own before (in certain neighborhoods)
Like Europe, the US has a pastiche of laws across states and municipalities, and varying levels of enforcement. My state has laws protecting free-range children.
You’re probably right that only in the US do people freak out over unaccompanied kids, but I wouldn’t say that’s true of most of the country.
This stuff truly makes my head spin. How do these people think humanity came to be, to today? Do they understand we in historically safe times? I thought the pendulum was swinging back on helicopter parents but some adults, some HN adults, have more money and tech-bias than common sense, or self-awareness, or any awareness of what they're doing to the children. And then remarking that they get around those restrictions. DUH?! Jesus, do some people here struggle this much to remember their own childhoods???
If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.
>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
I was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
They’re talking about the relative ineffectiveness of prohibition when it comes to teenagers. Generally speaking, they’re right. And the implication is therefore “don’t just blanket ban your way through screen time restrictions.”
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
> We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
When kids break the rules about screen time, there are consequences.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
I'm co-owner of an agency that builds websites, and we have a phrase that "accessibility is for everyone". Like you say, there are so many accessibility settings that can make things easier to use for anyone, from simple things like reduced motion to more complex things like colour filters.
No they don't require a network at all. The only drawback if there is no network is that the initial finding of the position takes longer. And maps can be downloaded so that they are available offline.
GPS receiver have been working without a "web connection" for ages (e.g. Garmins outdoor devices).
I use my smartphone in "airplane" mode but GPS enabled when hiking. No problems whatsoever.
At least on Android there's a fair number of apps like "osmand" which can download an entire state, province or country vector/map data, in their own semi-proprietary data format derived from public openstreetmap, for truly offline use anywhere you have a GPS signal. It'll even work on a phone that has no SIM card in it.
I really wish settings could be downloaded and implemented like transferring Bookmarks in browsers. That way I could take a setup of settings someone has created and simply mimic that by way of adopting all of the same settings in one fell swoop.
It would break the anxiety barrier of having to finagle with a bunch of different settings which exists for a lot of people believe it or not.Or Apple could just make it easier to implement these types of features much easier.
This might be just the thing for my elderly mother. She's used an iPhone for many many years, but struggles lately with motor dexterity, vision, and a bit of cognitive challenge making phone usage difficult. Lots of things I'd like to just hide she doesn't need to get to (like Settings).
Just a reminder to anyone reading that accessibility features are not just for other people but they are for our future selves. Growing old, getting injured etc are things that will happen to us all.
In the exact same boat with my mother in law at the moment. I was thinking of getting her one of those android for elderly phones but wanted to see if I could do something with her existing iphone first. At this point, anything that is recognizable is a plus so sticking with the iPhone will help there.
This looks perfect! I had been searching around for “feature phones” but the market seems dire. Lots of carrier locked devices or devices that still offer “a little bit of internet”. And then I started thinking about finding a repair shop when my kid inevitably breaks it and an old iPhone keeps looking better and better.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
That's a bad use of a very expensive phone. Get an actual dumb phone that's vastly cheaper.
> what if he gets lost?
Then he can look at street signs, ask someone nearby for directions, or (and this is an option I didn't have as a kid)... call someone. On the phone. That he has.
This is actually a really great feature for everyone else trying to reduce their phone use without switching to different "dumbphone". But why mandatory lock by passcode? I agree, that adding more friction would prevent user to switch back to standard UI, but still - it should be optional.
I keep observing that accessibility features often contain the tools we need to make our devices and apps more humane. This is one area that video games have been way ahead on.
Videogames are generally lagging WAY behind the rest of software. I've worked professionally in accessibility and in AAA game studios.
There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.
Sometimes I imagine that the mandate of one team (like those that build accessibility features) end up at direct odds with the mandate for other teams. And then there’s maybe an internal politicking where it’s like… okay you can have that feature that completely subverts a lot of how we want users to be behaving, but you can’t market it loudly.
I have no clue how things are actually structured at Apple, though. But I’m sure at this level of product maturity, there’s going to be internal struggles between user friendliness and profitability.
There is an entire ecosystem of kid's watches which do exactly that. Pretty much just a miniature cellphone with restricted functions that goes on the wrist like some sort of a tracking collar.
ScreenTime is for limiting and monitoring access to certain things for those who can otherwise handle a modern smartphone. Assistive Access is to remove the complexity for those who can't handle it. They are for different use cases, with some overlap in the venn diagram.
Wow. I was reading this article on a iPhone when the heavy ads crashed my Safari tab. After it auto-reloaded, the paywall claimed I had used all of my free articles. Thanks, Wired.
Kids have learned to walk places on their own without maps or satnav or tracking for hundreds of thousands of years. I believe everyone would benefit from that continuing. We don't teach kids that the only way to do arithmetic is with a calculator... they learn first, then get a tool that can support what they already know. Why do we think we should do it differently here, and train this learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
As I parent I am downvoting this because I am quite tired of others judging parents and their technology choices- particularly when it comes to restrictions.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
My 2c is that I'm not judging the parents, I'm judging the outputs I've seen of people raised on phones...and that's something that impacts everyone in our society. If you think you can do better, I guess go for it, but I haven't seen it
Parenting is also a strictly optional hard-mode that you choose to switch on knowing full well there's an 18 year cooldown before you can switch it off again.
Way I see it, most parents give their kids early access to phones just to keep them sedated and occupied. There is zero benefit for under 14yo to have unrestricted access to the smartphone or internet. It only benefits the parents.
It's so damn easy to hit "pause" on the kid by turning on the TV or handing over a phone, but the result is so apparent: demands for more phone or more TV.
> Crucially, this is where, unlike with Apple’s standard child screen-time restrictions, you can choose to completely block internet browsing by simply not allowing Safari
Very odd take given that you can block access to safari with iOS screen time as well...
my iphone is already kind of dumb. i don't have any social media apps. i have all notifications turned off (except ringtone for call). i only use my phone for calling and texting. it feels very expensive for those 2 operations. but i have the choice of downloading whatever shit i want to download.
While all one needz in such case is new commodore (yes, that commodore) flip phone.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.
>Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
Do you use curb cuts? Closed captions? Difficulty sliders in games? An electric toothbrush? Audible crosswalk signals?
All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.
If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.
So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.
This is a great example of the curb cut effect -- a system designed for accessibility needs turns out to be useful in other contexts. Curb cuts were designed for people with disabilities, particularly veterans, and over time have become more and more standard. They help people who use wheelchairs, yes, but also people without disabilities like those with strollers, bikes, luggage, or small kids.
We love to see accessibility features find uses outside their original intent.
Mobile Device Management (MDM) is the only effective way to restrict idevices.
All you need is a macbook and Apple Configurator.
You can remove safari, blacklist or whitelist websites, block installing apps, block deleting apps. It's really customizable.
Edit: expanded acronym.
Only? Their solution in the article seemed effective.
I've used MDM to make my iPhone dumb. It's great! I wish there was an easy way to publish my configuration so others could use it / adapt it, but it's a little involved because you have to wipe your phone the first time you set it up with configurator.
Supervised devices cannot be backed up and restored to supervised devices. You can only backup/restore to an unsupervised target. If you want supervision, you have to abandon your backup.
It sucks.
I did that when I had an iPhone, I agree it was excellent. More people should do it.
Looking forward to MDM support on GrapheneOS.
I’m curious about this, what did you do to make it dumb?
> All you need is a macbook
Is it really not possible to do this with a non-Apple machine?
Not afaict.
What does the acronym stand for
Mobile Device Management
mobile device management
Monumental Deployment Mastermind
MDM is just parental control for adults.
MDM is the worst part of iOS. It undermines all of apple’s security claims, basically making iOS windows. Devices should not be able to be remotely controlled.
MDM is designed for corporate owned phone environments where there's a great many good reasons to lock down a phone. If you're handing out company owned phones to employees you want the ability to remotely lock/wipe, install and remove apps, set a number of restrictions. If people want to do anything else they are completely welcome to do it on their own personally owned property.
For instance I have recently seen a very successful Apple MDM deployment in a school environment where the teachers and staff have access to a great depth and breadth of PII of a thousand children under age 16. You don't want all those phones to become a free-for-all of people doing whatever they want.
MDM enables enterprises to control how the phones they own behave. If anything it makes it more secure, if an enterprise were to only allow allowlisted apps to run on it.
The only issue is BYOD via MDM (when it's not via "Work Profile"), which is somewhat scary from a user perspective, especially from how hard it is to tell what permissions they might be able to spring on you at any time.
I assume they can spy on anything, that's why I refuse to do any kind of BYOD that requires MDM enrollment. It's also one IT mistake away from wiping out my personal data from my own property.
Company's Outlook, Teams, MS Authenticator and Slack on my personal phone? Ehhhh fine.
The second IT requires a profile it's the second I'm uninstalling anything company related from my phone. They can give me a company phone, or I will only access work related things from their laptop.
Happened twice to me, one time I got a company phone, the other, computer only.
And then some colleagues even paid out-of-pocket to upgrade their Android phones once IT dictated their OS were out of support. No way.
Yeah, no - if I provide my employees $1000 devices, I most certainly would like to be able to exercise some sort of management over them.
> making iOS windows
Baseless claims.
$1000 is irrelevant. Corporate information, and clients information (sometime including PII) is worth millions.
It can be done all locally. How can an optional feature that's not even easy to use be the worst part of iOS?
Nonsense. MDM is usually for devices owned by the company or opt in by you personally. There is no way to attack or transparently MDM a personal phone that I know of.
Archived https://archive.is/LV6Cw
Long back Xiaomi Phones used to have soemthing like this. That one feature was how I migrated my in-laws to Smartphones from their Nokias.
The key content from the article;
Here's how you set it up: Head into Settings, tap Accessibility, scroll down to the General section at the very bottom, and tap Assistive Access. Now, tap Set Up Assistive Access, then Continue. It will then ask you to select your preferred appearance: rows or a grid. I suggest choosing a grid. This is how you get those super-large tiles. Now the OS will ask you to select allowed apps—tap the green plus icon next to the apps you want to allow.
Summary:
Simplify the iPhone home screen with large icons for kids or seniors:
Settings > Accessibility > General section at the very bottom > Assistive Access
it is not just simplified, it lets you chose which apps to show in that "simplified" view. For the elderly, that removes a lot of clutter and ways to shot yourself in the foot.
The article doesn't emphasize it, but Assisted Access also adds back the home/back button, like older iPhones and Androids. There is no more swipe-up motion that I see my parents struggle with because they did it too slow or started from slightly too high on the screen.
I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons (gotta maximize that screen real estate), but the affordance for an obvious home/reset button is great for some people.
I'm young and able-bodied, still have trouble swiping up. Especially after Liquid Glass glassed my phone.
> I completely understand why Apple and Google removed the buttons
It was more of design decision than practical one. My phone has a taller screen than 16:9 so when I watch videos there are black bars on the sides anyway - although my previous phone had aspect ratio perfectly matching the cinema one, making movies truly full-screen (minus rounded corners and the front camera). When I'm doing literally anything else, the buttons are displayed on the bottom of the screen. Some of my friends use gestures and actually that does give them extra screen space, but IMO gestures are less convenient and totally not worth it.
But when you show this on a demo it does look neat, especially with a game.
Give me back physical buttons please.
> My son only gets Calls, Messages, Maps, Camera (so we can video call, but I've ruthlessly turned off selfies), Photos, and Music. Nothing else.
I get that the internet is an addictive scary place with lots of content potentially dangerous to a young person.
But why would you care if your child took a selfie? That seems pretty draconian.
Wait, not being able to make a picture of yourself is pretty draconian? In this case, the world before smartphones was a living Hell on Earth.
Fun fact: cameras have existed long before cellphones (let alone smart phones)
Its draconian not because selfies are a fundamental need, but because they seem harmless. Rules should be justifiable.
I'm speculating that it's not the selfie; it's where that selfie ends up (or with whom).
OP apparently still hasn't learned that the kids today are taking selfies "blind" using the rear camera.
My first phone that had a (rear) camera 20 years ago also had a chrome-plated mirror thing to help us take selfies. I guess nobody called them selfies then.
I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.
Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.
I do this myself (albeit pretty rarely) since the rear camera is significantly better than the front camera, especially in low light.
Your comment led me to the Insta360 device that makes it easy to take selfies with the main camera:
https://www.theverge.com/tech/907670/insta360-snap-usb-c-mag...
Second screen: provided by USB-C screencast and accessibility settings for to support touch. Image of device: https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...
Also, it doesn't add up. How would Camera let you video call? Don't you need Facetime?
I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
They may have polished the feature since then, but given that it’s an Accessibility feature and was never meant to receive much attention in this regard, it may always be half-baked.I just tested #2 on iOS 27 Developer Beta, and this has been resolved. You can select “anyone” instead of specific contacts.
#2 seems like a feature, not a bug. I certainly don't want my 11 year old texting/calling unapproved numbers, way too young for that.
Definitely a feature, but also ruins it for this person's use case
The kids going to be driving a car in 3 years...
now that it has received attention, Apple might just throw another engineer at it :)
Eh I’ve filed a few bugs a few years ago and they seem to have been ignored. I tried it for a while and it crashed my phone frequently. My gut says it’s a hack, hence the performance issues.
Looks good for old people too. My mom can no longer grasp anything but the most simple tech, and even then...
I like the feature, but I don't like the assumption at the beginning.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own. But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it. He is far too young to have unfettered access to the internet and social media platforms, but what if he gets lost? A classic Nokia, supplying just texts and calls, won't come to his aid. Maps and satnav require a web connection.
What if he gets lost? With a classic Nokia, he could still call someone and get help. Or, he might (heaven forbid) just need to ask someone for help. Or walk around until he remembers where he is. These are all good skills to learn.
Only issue is that kids going outside alone has become highly stigmatized in society to the point where doing so gets you jailed and charged[0].
The kid will grow up to almost always be able to contact most any human in the world. Knowing how and when to do that is probably going to be a more useful skill.
0: https://imprintnews.org/top-stories/is-it-a-crime-to-let-you...
Side note: As above article states, after this arrest SB110 was passed to specifically outline what is reasonable for this situation.
the idea of tagging my kid with a tracker like they're a wild bird being tracked is repugnant
Just a suggestion, be more mindful when you make comments involving other people's kids.
(which is generally a no-no unless you're invited to)
On the internet is fine, but I've been to places around the world where a comment like that would result in black eyes, missing teeth, etc.
Kids are living beings. If people don't want to hear about how they paint their car that's one thing. But if they don't want to hear any comments on how they treat a fellow human that's very concerning
What did they actually say about some's kida?
Knocking out someones teeth would necessitate filing charges
Oh, absolutely! I would just prefer to avoid all of that.
you should be having words with people who would turn to violence on such a short fuse then, not me and my comment that didn't even say anything about anyone elses kids
I'm very curious as to what places of the world that would be.
Oh, it's a very long list. It could be anywhere actually, by "place" I didn't mean something like a specific city, but more of a place in a city where that situation would most likely unfold.
Anyway, I don't want to derail the conversation too much, this is a very interesting topic but it is off-topic.
If you want to keep talking about it send me an email! Info on my profile :).
Eh, people who write about their parenting in the internet are opening it for comments
We had some friends over last form the US. One 11 yr kid in the group was bored and said: ok I’m gonna go home now, I need the keys please.
He walked home by himself - maybe 500 meters… For us Europeans it was nothing to notice really, but the Americans were absolutely shocked.
And I've been where the Americans had some friends over from the US, and the 11/12 year olds grabbed some rifles and said they'd be back tomorrow. The Americans barely noticed, the Europeans flipped.
America is big, and parts of it can be very different.
I don’t think you can profile this as American. Are they conservative suburbanites? My kid walks to/from school longer than that. Many kids take public transit in big cities. Rural kids may ride a motorbike much further.
Well, it is a pretty American thing for this to be the case. Americans have been arrested for letting kids walk 500 meters on their own before (in certain neighborhoods)
Like Europe, the US has a pastiche of laws across states and municipalities, and varying levels of enforcement. My state has laws protecting free-range children.
You’re probably right that only in the US do people freak out over unaccompanied kids, but I wouldn’t say that’s true of most of the country.
This stuff truly makes my head spin. How do these people think humanity came to be, to today? Do they understand we in historically safe times? I thought the pendulum was swinging back on helicopter parents but some adults, some HN adults, have more money and tech-bias than common sense, or self-awareness, or any awareness of what they're doing to the children. And then remarking that they get around those restrictions. DUH?! Jesus, do some people here struggle this much to remember their own childhoods???
If it bleeds, it leads. That is, our media has hyped up violence in society as it’s become more rare, and politicians use it to scare people into thinking we need to go back to the good old days.
>children have quickly found workarounds for such measures, such as asking friends to message them links, which can bypass restrictions when opened
I was very surprised of this by my own kids find workarounds like l33t hackers. Apple's restrictions are a joke. The app store is full of things they can mess with. My daughter mentioned some way to get around screen time.
I've ended up just taking the iPads away.
When I was a kid my parents wouldn’t give me a cellphone. I wanted to call my girlfriend. Well, really, my girlfriend wanted me to call her. A lot.
They didn’t give me one.
I ended up finding a way to get my own through a more apathetic adult who I could pay cash to cover my bill (only an extra $10/month on a family plan).
I certainly am not telling you to just cave in, but perhaps this story can be a reminder that technology you control is potentially better than technology you don’t.
What age groups are we talking here, because if we're talking about a 7 year old, giving them unfettered screen time is probably bad parenting. However if we are talking about someone old enough to have gf/bf its probably also bad parenting to not let them develop their own self control around technology. They have to be an adult eventually.
I started my kid at 12 with an extremely locked down iPhone. She fights the restrictions at every turn and I have to make sure that she understands that finding loopholes is fun but also if I catch her violating the spirit of the restrictions there will be consequences. So she proudly tells me about clever workarounds she finds but still puts the phone away at the appropriate times. It’s kind of fun that she’s developing an instinct for subversion.
That’s how we handle it with ours as well. He found a way around a certain control and we opened a bug report with the vendor and it was acknowledged and fixed. He then realized he locked out other kids with that and laughed and tries to find more worth reporting.
Is that black hat or white hat?
Chaotic hat
We didn't give our kid her own phone until a few months past her 13th birthday. She was at a private elementary school since kindergarten and her class was small and mostly had the same kids from K-8, so the parents got to know each other early on and there was general agreement on 'no phones until 13'. This greatly reduced the "but so-and-so has one".
I was a teenager, if that wasn’t clear. But I was more of the mindset of lending a story, I can’t say whether or not it’s relevant to the parent commenter’s scenario.
I don’t think “one can get around rules” is a very insightful thing to say, it’s just a truism.
They’re talking about the relative ineffectiveness of prohibition when it comes to teenagers. Generally speaking, they’re right. And the implication is therefore “don’t just blanket ban your way through screen time restrictions.”
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
Yup. I think American culture is broadly too permissive with under-14s and too restrictive with over-14s (but under-21s).
I told my elementary-age child that they can have a phone when they are old enough to sneakily buy one without me knowing.
Who said it had to be unfettered?
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What's stopping them from getting a burner device anyway? Imposing too much control can push them away, but a lack of direction can also make them wander.
All you can do is nudge and try not to worry too much. It's certain there are other influences in their life you don't know about.
Australia was one of the first countries to institute social media bans under a certain age. Reading the reports and commentary from parents there has been fascinating, but not really surprising if you remember what it's like to be a kid.
The most positive thing I read was that the kids are spending less time on social media in front of adults (like at the dinner table) because they're not supposed to be on social media.
But most of the parents in the article I read believed their kids had circumvented the ban somehow. Their problem now was that the kids' social media use was entirely hidden from them and they had no way to monitor it or even bring it up with their kids. The kids didn't want to admit to using social media at all.
None of this should be very surprising for any of us who remember back into childhood. Circumventing the restrictions was a game with its own reward. I had friends who were finding ways to get around the school's internet controls for the fun of doing it, not because it blocked any sites they wanted to use.
I was definitely that kid. I remember discovering that my district's web filter had a default password (something like "changethis123"), by watching one substitute with exceptionally poor typing skills. Problem was, substitutes' accounts were disabled frequently, and any one account only really had a lifetime of a week or two, before someone in the IT department realized that 300 devices were connecting to the network with the same credentials.
But the staff lists were public, and I had the default password. So I set up a script to turn the lists of names of teachers, librarians, janitors, etc. into usernames, and then tried to login with all of them. Turns out, most support staff, especially custodians, hadn't changed their passwords. (I'm guessing their jobs didn't involve much computer use). With a list of a couple dozen working accounts, I'd mete out 1 or 2 at a time to my friends, and we had teacher-level access for the rest of our time there. Don't remember using it for much, maybe showing my friends a youtube video during lunch or something.
This demonstrates why forcing people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs is a stupid, stupid policy.
The upside of well-crafted social media bans for kids under a certain age is that you can use them to apply financial pain to social media companies for failing to prevent kids from signing up.
Applying stiff financial penalties for allowing kids to sign up for social media sites is another way of saying that you want to have to provide your ID to log in to social sites.
Reddit, YouTube, Discord, and even Hacker News qualify as social sites. I don't know about you, but I don't want to have to start providing ID to log in to everything.
If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok, you must have missed all of the discussion where they've been extended to many more sites with social features. Goodbye privacy!
> If you think these imaginary laws would only apply to Facebook and TikTok
We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
Or base it on sites that have advertising. Products/services that are targeted to minors shouldn't be permitted to have advertisements anyway.
I don't find "We've done a bad job with X so we should abandon X rather than attempting to do X better" to be a compelling argument on its own.
> We can literally write "these laws apply only apply to Facebook and TikTok" into the laws.
I don’t find it useful to imagine laws like this. This isn’t what happens in real law making.
I’m talking about real, actual laws that are getting passed.
It’s not going to be perfectly targeted at websites you don’t use while leaving everything you like free, open, and privacy preserving.
It’s really important that we’re being realistic and honest about this. Inviting bad laws into the internet with fantasies about how they’ll be carefully scoped and limited to other websites is not realistic.
The DMA designated gatekeepers seems to be pretty well-targeted as a real law that's currently on the books.
It applies solely to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
Going by that list, YouTube and GitHub would be impacted. They have social features and primarily host user-generated content.
Imagining that these laws will be precisely written to avoid any services you like is a dangerous fallacy. That's how people rationalize bad laws.
Remember when all of the surveillance laws were only going to target the terrorists? Look how far that drifted.
When my friend's kids were totally obsessed with League of Legends, I offered to set up a home firewall with increasingly difficult workarounds, so by the time they graduated high school they'd at least have a cybersecurity certificate and possibly a Ph.D in networking.
Adversarially train the children, rlai works on human brains too?
That’s how 80s kids learned computers and programming. Trying to install a game and having to lookup what the hell “fat32” was.
Dude. 80’s kids think of FAT32 as that new filesystem that supports more than 8.3.
You guys had filesystems??
Nope, just fat. ;)
HIMEM.SYS and EMM386.EXE you mean :-)
My childhood was filled with increasing escalations of restrictions to both the computer and the network, and my workarounds.
Excellent education
I found it such a hassle to keep locked down I gave up. Like, he'd be so aware that he'd find ways to watch me enter the PIN code when adjusting the settings. I'd have to be ever-vigilant and I got tired of it.
I've concluded the only way to avoid workarounds it to reduce my own screen time. I stopped having a tablet myself. Got off the Iphone too.
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
Try discipline
Children don't have fully formed brains. There's a wildly varying ceiling on the efficacy of discipline.
curious kind of discipline you have in mind.
Time-honored punishment: revoke various privileges for periods of time until they get it.
In this case, seems pretty topical to just take the phone away entirely for a few days.
When kids break the rules about screen time, there are consequences.
Not Dad fiddling with the settings, but instead Dad teaching a lesson about respecting the rules, and doing what you said you would do (children agree to obey the time limits in order to have access to the device).
How Dad should teach the lesson varies by family and by child.
Is it okay if Mom teaches the lessons about respecting the rules?
No one asked.
Back in elementary school, I used Applescript in Hypercard to get around the restrictions on our school computers. Kids always find ways.
We were once 1337 hackers too
You can lock them out of the app store completely, and only allow a list of approved domains that can browse to. I also had it shut everything down at 10pm so they couldn't spend all night trying to find workarounds. Worked really well, but it did require some work on my part to manage the installed apps and allowed domains though
A friend was woken up by his young kid trying to surreptitiously lever his finger onto the TouchID sensor to pay for a game dlc.
LMAO incredible
As a late Gen X I grew up when the "it's 10pm do you know where your kids are" ad's ran. When "just say no" was all I heard for a decade. When sex ed was marginally controversial. Honestly, I remain shocked that I never got arrested for some of my shenanigans. The rest of it was drinking, drugs and partying.
I was candid with my kids about what I did in my youth, I was also honest with them about how terrible the tech was. They also got unfettered access to it (tech), and there were lots of conversations and consequences around its (mis)use.
Given the history of "abstinence only" sex ed, and "just say no" drug campaigns, and their massive failures; just not letting them have it seemed like it was going to create the problems that many are looking to avoid.
As they have moved into adulthood they have taken those lessons to heart, and are now the ones who complain about their peers and their abuses of social media and inability to self moderate. These same conversations continue now, with the added topic of AI -
You are teaching your children to be even more secretive and hide things from you even better.
Great. They are learning good security culture. That will be useful later in life when every move they make will be surveilled.
It seems like Apple put a big focus on 'kids mode' things this WWDC. To the point they dedicated a major section of the keynote to it. Hopefully a part of that will be focussed on the workarounds.
There are so many features under “accessibility” that have wider usages.
I'm co-owner of an agency that builds websites, and we have a phrase that "accessibility is for everyone". Like you say, there are so many accessibility settings that can make things easier to use for anyone, from simple things like reduced motion to more complex things like colour filters.
I use the back tap feature for shortcuts and have my iPad auto-answer FaceTime calls when I’m out so I can check in on the dogs.
Lots of neat features hiding beneath the surface!
i consider it the root menu of the phone
Assistive access is the feature being referred to by tfa
> Maps and satnav require a web connection.
No they don't require a network at all. The only drawback if there is no network is that the initial finding of the position takes longer. And maps can be downloaded so that they are available offline.
GPS receiver have been working without a "web connection" for ages (e.g. Garmins outdoor devices).
I use my smartphone in "airplane" mode but GPS enabled when hiking. No problems whatsoever.
At least on Android there's a fair number of apps like "osmand" which can download an entire state, province or country vector/map data, in their own semi-proprietary data format derived from public openstreetmap, for truly offline use anywhere you have a GPS signal. It'll even work on a phone that has no SIM card in it.
I really wish settings could be downloaded and implemented like transferring Bookmarks in browsers. That way I could take a setup of settings someone has created and simply mimic that by way of adopting all of the same settings in one fell swoop.
It would break the anxiety barrier of having to finagle with a bunch of different settings which exists for a lot of people believe it or not.Or Apple could just make it easier to implement these types of features much easier.
That's exactly what configuration profiles are for. They work on macOS, iOS, tvOS etc. and you can configure them with a GUI app from Apple (https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/install-or-remove-con...)
This might be just the thing for my elderly mother. She's used an iPhone for many many years, but struggles lately with motor dexterity, vision, and a bit of cognitive challenge making phone usage difficult. Lots of things I'd like to just hide she doesn't need to get to (like Settings).
Just a reminder to anyone reading that accessibility features are not just for other people but they are for our future selves. Growing old, getting injured etc are things that will happen to us all.
Going to go and give my mum a call now!
In the exact same boat with my mother in law at the moment. I was thinking of getting her one of those android for elderly phones but wanted to see if I could do something with her existing iphone first. At this point, anything that is recognizable is a plus so sticking with the iPhone will help there.
This looks perfect! I had been searching around for “feature phones” but the market seems dire. Lots of carrier locked devices or devices that still offer “a little bit of internet”. And then I started thinking about finding a repair shop when my kid inevitably breaks it and an old iPhone keeps looking better and better.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
That's a bad use of a very expensive phone. Get an actual dumb phone that's vastly cheaper.
> what if he gets lost?
Then he can look at street signs, ask someone nearby for directions, or (and this is an option I didn't have as a kid)... call someone. On the phone. That he has.
This is actually a really great feature for everyone else trying to reduce their phone use without switching to different "dumbphone". But why mandatory lock by passcode? I agree, that adding more friction would prevent user to switch back to standard UI, but still - it should be optional.
'Perfect' being used as a filler word in a headline is obscene to me.
It's still a smartphone.
The perfect dumb phone is just a dumb phone. (Bonus, they're an order of magnitude cheaper than a decent smartphone).
Similar initial thought, but in the article they say they want their kid to be able to use maps apps to be able to navigate if they get lost.
I keep observing that accessibility features often contain the tools we need to make our devices and apps more humane. This is one area that video games have been way ahead on.
Videogames are generally lagging WAY behind the rest of software. I've worked professionally in accessibility and in AAA game studios.
There's a lot of movement in games over the past 5-10 years, so there's a lot more visibility into a11y there, but in general that industry still has catching up to do. What you are seeing is higher interest and velocity there, and given some time they'll definitely catch up with the slower iteration cycles in mobile and web a11y, but I guarantee you the story is much richer on the web (in particular) than it is in games.
Sometimes I imagine that the mandate of one team (like those that build accessibility features) end up at direct odds with the mandate for other teams. And then there’s maybe an internal politicking where it’s like… okay you can have that feature that completely subverts a lot of how we want users to be behaving, but you can’t market it loudly.
I have no clue how things are actually structured at Apple, though. But I’m sure at this level of product maturity, there’s going to be internal struggles between user friendliness and profitability.
While living in Japan, our kid used a cellphone with 3 buttons.
1. Call mom, 2. Call dad. 3. Call Auntie.
These kid's phones were very common, inexpensive and worked great.
There is an entire ecosystem of kid's watches which do exactly that. Pretty much just a miniature cellphone with restricted functions that goes on the wrist like some sort of a tracking collar.
For some reason when I opened this the sound of a helicopter hovering shook the walls.
> Come September, he will have to walk across town to school on his own.
*THE HORROR*
> But if he's going to be walking around out in the world without me, then a tracking tag won't cut it.
Uhhhhhhhhh. The way this is stated so plainly as if it were self-evident fact is telling. The author longs for the umbilical cord.
> but what if he gets lost?
What if he learns a life lesson, navigation and/or some form of self-reliance or independence?
I just... no wonder Kids Today are so cooked.
Does Android have this feature?
On Androids with Google Play Serivces, I assume you can use an MDM tool to achieve a similar effect.
It's like At Ease for mobile. Neat!
This seems like a much more comprehensive solution than screen time
ScreenTime is for limiting and monitoring access to certain things for those who can otherwise handle a modern smartphone. Assistive Access is to remove the complexity for those who can't handle it. They are for different use cases, with some overlap in the venn diagram.
Wow. I was reading this article on a iPhone when the heavy ads crashed my Safari tab. After it auto-reloaded, the paywall claimed I had used all of my free articles. Thanks, Wired.
His kid doesn't need a phone and doesn't need to be tracked to walk to school. Get over it.
Yup, came to say this.
Kids have learned to walk places on their own without maps or satnav or tracking for hundreds of thousands of years. I believe everyone would benefit from that continuing. We don't teach kids that the only way to do arithmetic is with a calculator... they learn first, then get a tool that can support what they already know. Why do we think we should do it differently here, and train this learned helplessness without a phone glued to your hand. I suspect a lot of this is projection of the parents' own discomfort with being away from their phone.
As I parent I am downvoting this because I am quite tired of others judging parents and their technology choices- particularly when it comes to restrictions.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
My 2c is that I'm not judging the parents, I'm judging the outputs I've seen of people raised on phones...and that's something that impacts everyone in our society. If you think you can do better, I guess go for it, but I haven't seen it
Parenting is also a strictly optional hard-mode that you choose to switch on knowing full well there's an 18 year cooldown before you can switch it off again.
Yeah, but your kid can also walk to school without a map, it's not a big deal.
Way I see it, most parents give their kids early access to phones just to keep them sedated and occupied. There is zero benefit for under 14yo to have unrestricted access to the smartphone or internet. It only benefits the parents.
It's so damn easy to hit "pause" on the kid by turning on the TV or handing over a phone, but the result is so apparent: demands for more phone or more TV.
Give your kid some quarters so they can call you on a pay phone like the old days.
As a parent I want a phone I can find because kids will lose a phone.
So, Find My is invaluable for locating it again.
The kid doesn't need it, but the parents need the kid to have it on him to appease the bored onlookers one digit away from calling the authorities.
"You must disable SIM PIN to enable Assistive Access..."
Also refuses to activate with alphanumeric passcode enabled..
I could sort of imagine plausible reasons for that, but not allowing sim pin seems… nonobvious.
> Crucially, this is where, unlike with Apple’s standard child screen-time restrictions, you can choose to completely block internet browsing by simply not allowing Safari
Very odd take given that you can block access to safari with iOS screen time as well...
my iphone is already kind of dumb. i don't have any social media apps. i have all notifications turned off (except ringtone for call). i only use my phone for calling and texting. it feels very expensive for those 2 operations. but i have the choice of downloading whatever shit i want to download.
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While all one needz in such case is new commodore (yes, that commodore) flip phone.
Whatsapp, google maps, calls, sms. No browser, no store, no bullshit. Kids dont need more, if parents dont want to ruin (part of) their childhood. No need for restrictive apple ecosystem neither.
>Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
Do you use curb cuts? Closed captions? Difficulty sliders in games? An electric toothbrush? Audible crosswalk signals?
All of those have significant roots in accessibility for people with disabilities. I guarantee you that the people who invented them would be thrilled to see them have widespread adoption for all populations.
If something finds use in addition to its use for disability amelioration, it becomes more widespread and normalized. When it's wider spread and normalized, it becomes easier for people with disabilities to know it's available and to use it without stigma.
So no, you've got it entirely backwards I'm afraid. We do not think about assistive technology as something for people with disabilities. We think about it as something that helps people, and if it helps more people, even better.