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All of this is work, more work, admin work, things I would pay an assistant to do. Why would I want to be a system administrator when I can just not give my children systems that I need to administer?

This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.

Parents are aware. This is a horrible solution.

What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.

It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).

> What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.

Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?

It's not restricted. It's less capable. Entirely different thing. And they'll view it as a completely different device for different purpose (voice calls vs. doom scrolling).

Specifically designed to be less capable is the same as being restricted. It's purpose is explicitly to restrict the user communication to some predefined setting by a third party (the parent and company behind it) and the user is well aware of that, as this e-waste cost as much as a cheap or second hand smartphone.

The jukebox I got for my basement is not a restricted Spotify-enabled smart speaker. It's a different device that does something different.

First, you got it for yourself, so you chose to use a jukebox (or in other words : restrict your listening to specific titles on physical media) instead to impose it to other, which make a big difference in what people see as a restrictions(instead of a choice, which is self inflicted).

Chosing a Tin Can is obviously to restrict your kid usage of communication, it's the nature of the purchase of the device.

First of all, comparing a locked-down smartphone with a fully capable smartphone is different from comparing a smartphone with a 'landline phone'. That's like apples to apples compared to apples to oranges.

Secondly as far as I understand, you need the same type of phone at both ends to communicate with each other. Looks like the tin-can and other similar devices are designed to talk only to each other. While that is a restriction, it eliminates the avenue for a comparison. The friends are all on equal ground.

Thirdly, you're talking as if parental controls, especially unequal parental controls are a bad thing. Parental controls aren't like government or corporate restrictions. There is a necessary assumption that parents act in the best interests of the kids, unlike the other two.

Some parents are irresponsible and may allow their kids to consume alcohol or drugs. Will you allow your kids to do it too, because it may end up in comparisons? You have to talk to your kids about why that is a bad idea. It's wrong to assume that kids won't listen at all. Don't most kids refrain from drinking, smoking and driving till they come of age?

If this sort of control seems unfair or unethical to you, you're basically exposing your kids to serious dangers. And brain rot is a very serious problem that HN doesn't talk enough about. It ruins even the seniors. But for kids, it wreaks havoc with their IQ and personality.

Choosing a Tin Can for a child that doesn't have a phone isn't restricting them, it's empowering them with a new form of communication to chat to their friends. Getting my 10 year old a bicycle instead of a car isn't a restriction.

Compared to getting them nothing, yes. But the OP's point is that this doesn't prevent the child from mentally comparing themselves to peers that have a smartphone, and viewing their Tin Can as a "restriction" imposed by their parents.

Which it is. I don't understand the need to wink-wink-nudge-nudge pretend it's anything else by the others in this thread. Just own it, restrictions aren't bad by default.

It's no use having an argument with thig guy. He simply has a more modern* definition of what "restricted" means.

*I don't know what to call it. It's like those people that buy a car with heated seats locked down by subscription and calling it "a feature" because some cars don't have them at all.

It's not "restricted", it's designed to serve a different purpose. A bicycle is not a "restricted" car.

Nightmare? Maybe you need to work on telling your children no.

Instead of being bitter for 7 years perhaps you should not have purchased such an absurd thing.

That's why I'm thinking of getting my kid (who doesn't have a phone yet) a Unihertz Jelly Star.

https://www.unihertz.com/fr-fr/products/jelly-star

- Because it's small, it doesn't look like a regular smartphone

- The small size would make it impractical for social media/scrolling/videos even if I were to unlock it

...but compared to a dumbphone, I can still allow Spotify and their school management software so they can access their schedule and homework

That looks very ugly. Any kid above the age of 12 would reject that.

Same exact reason 90% of people don’t use the Shortcuts app. This stuff is obvious for you and me, but tedious and painful for everyone else, and it’s still easy to miss one thing that leaves it easy to circumvent. There are people whose full time job is managing MDM in IT departments, and it’s not just because of the number of devices they manage. It’s because this stuff is complicated. And that’s for grownups, whose judgment is expected to be better than 12-year-olds, and who can be fired.

Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.

Because it’s a lot easier to refuse to buy an expensive gadget for your kids than to refuse to press a few buttons to set them free.

As a parent, two reasons:

1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now".

2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.

Indeed, there's an additional problem as well. There are settings, and then there are settings that allow one to change the settings. Not only are there hundreds of settings but they are duplicated in this way.

Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.

Hello! Parent that's fully aware of this. My son has access to a landline and it solves the problem of tech as a tool vs a past time. If he thinks of his friend, he calls, friends reach out etc. No scrolling for something to do. I see my phone usage and am constantly trying to introduce friction into it. This is an extension of that concept.

Apple makes this a huge PITA, along with having to do a significant amount of it from another apple device.

I'm glad we ditched iPads, it sucked.

This has to be intentional.

Drug dealer getting the kids hooked early is priority #1.

Give just enough "parental control" to lure parents in.

Make it just annoying enough that the parents eventually give up and the kid is the one pushing the drug the entire time.

I don’t think people are buying this fun novelty landline phone because they haven’t heard of parental controls

As another commenter said, the problem with parental controls on a smartphone is your kid constantly nagging you to approve installation of one more app, or extend their daily limit "just for today" (again).

With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.

I know as a kid I would have hated that and put a lot of effort into circumventing it.

I did that for my kid when he was 10 or so. He had it "hacked" before I knew it. If he had done it himself, I would have been proud, but some other kid did it. Never even tried after that. He's 17 now, he's fine.

Best (for older kids) would be a dumb cell phone like we had in the 2000s. Good for phone calls, texting, and simple offline apps like casual games, camera and music player. Maybe email. Definitely no web browser, youtube, or social media crap.

I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.

There are: https://www.hmd.com/en_int/nokia-3210

(and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)

Our kid breaks through the screen time regularly, even with new passcodes. Have a theory it is done from the wife's macbook, but not entirely sure. Gave up; would not recommend or use again.

For some people like me, iOS parental controls are utterly and completely broken. I have tried to make it work over three or four years and just as many iOS releases - no dice.

About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.

Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.

Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/

Yep. After years of frustration, trying every possible way to fix it, uncountable hours of searching, I asked Claude about it: "just subscribe to an external service". This is ridiculous, Android's parental controls work flawlessly. If I knew that beforehand, I would never had got my kid an iOS device.

The opposite is also true: Apple’s parental controls fail closed in inscrutable and impossible to debug ways. Yesterday, in order to share an iPad’s location with my iPhone, I had to totally disable managing Screen Time on the device. Every time I would click “share with <my name>”, the damn thing would tell me “Location settings can’t be updated right now, try again later”. No other combination of “solutions” on the Apple support forum, the random blogspam links, or the oh-so-helpful search-AI-summary thing even made a dent. I suspect something in the underlying data model was out of sync with the UI or something. Incredibly frustrating experience from the “it just works” vendor.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

How do I lock down the iPhone so it works only at home?

Never put a SIM in it?

Then how can they make calls when home?

By using any VOIP provider.

I think we are except Apple lockdown experience for this is total shit show, not only you need to spend so much time but also if you need to change something (at least for me) it just reset all the previous options, because I turned it off to manually install something that was locked down

I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.

Yeah.

Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc.

I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.

I mean, a landline + phone is way cheaper to be fair

Or a MagicJack