Buried Apple feature turns an iPhone into the perfect kids' dumb phone
wired.com
wired.com
We love to see accessibility features find uses outside their original intent.
Generally we only refer to someone with a permanent disability as “disabled” but in reality we are all disabled in various categories at different times of our lives. Accessibility is important to all three groups (you need to be able to use your phone with one hand), therefore accessibility is important to everyone.
Honestly, what's the difference between a wheelchair and prescription glasses? Both are medical devices prescribed be a healthcare professional to assist with a physical impairment.
Taking the silly question seriously for a moment: the difference is that with prescription glasses, you can function just exactly like someone who doesn't need them. Once you are wearing the glasses, your ability to do pretty much anything is unimpaired. Whereas a wheelchair restores some mobility, but does not, for example, impart the ability to climb stairs. It does not give you back all the mobility of someone who doesn't need one.
The more recent WHO's Global report on health equity suggests 16%, as populations age: https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240063600
The CDC considers this closer to 30%: https://www.cdc.gov/disability-and-health/articles-documents...
This number is generally considered to be rising for a few reasons. Aging population, wars resulting in higher injuries but fewer deaths, the number of people who are able to survive disease (rather than historically just dying.
You might find the Washington Group's definition, which applies a spectrum, and estimates an approximately 6-12% rate of disability. https://www.washingtongroup-disability.com/wg-blog/post/diff...
> I doubt the number would get anywhere close to 15% if the definition only included the kinds of disabilities that are immediately obvious to anyone looking.
Thank god that's not the definition. Deafness/significant hearing impairment isn't immediately visible, and that's estimated at ~5%. Plenty of folks are low vision enough to need assistive technology (like a screenreader) even if they don't have a cane and may be able to navigate. Plenty of people with MS have great days where they can walk, and days where they cannot. There are people who lack the strength in their hands to dress themselves, yet they can go out and about just fine.
Your definition is too narrow. Plenty of people experience impassible barriers that are not visible. Happy to provide some additional educational resources for you if they would be helpful.
> Certainly it's not true that 15% of the people I see are in a wheelchair, on crutches, missing a limb, obviously blind (e.g. walking with a cane), and so on.
Are you in a wealthy area? Think globally, do you think your town has better or worse support than other parts of the world for people with disabilities? Do you think your region has better or worse regional conflicts or disease? Think globally.
Now, I think the assumed way to get in is to keep the door open with your body while simultaneously lifting the rollator over both thresholds. This requires considerable strength, as you have to reach far with a heavy weight. Maybe an athlete could do it. Not an old exhausted person.
An old person needs to first leave the rollator out, open the door and make it so it stays open with a hook. Involves crouching and working with your hands close to the ground. Then lift the rollator one by one over the steps and go inside. Then come back out and close the door.
A foot operated door stopper and a few slopes could probably ease that up tremendously.
Which itself is kind of an interesting example of how these things should work, because the curbs are maintained by the government, so the compliance cost is getting paid by the taxpayer.
Which is as it should be, because if something is to be required as a public benefit then it should be paid for out of public funds rather than as an unfunded mandate. Then thing like curb cuts continue to be a good deal so people are happy to fund them, whereas measures that cost more than they're worth get the level of opposition that they should because the taxpayer has to pay for them. And either way you would stop stressing smaller companies and causing market consolidation by increasing compliance costs.
The fact that compliance costs outprices some smaller companies rather shows that we as a society prefer to have accomodations, than live in one where such accomodations are only affordable to the affluent.
Not at all, it just happens that we're already doing the right thing in that case because it wasn't possible to stick the wrong party with the bill.
> The fact that compliance costs outprices some smaller companies rather shows that we as a society prefer to have accomodations, than live in one where such accomodations are only affordable to the affluent.
It isn't the consumers being priced out, it's the producers. Which in turn causes the market to consolidate so that only the affluent can afford the big company monopolist's product anyway, and everyone else not only doesn't get accommodations but can't even afford the product or service anymore. Housing is a solid example of this; unfunded mandates make construction significantly more expensive and now millions of people can't afford a home.
Whereas if the taxpayer had to fund everything the government mandates, the mandates would have to account for the cost directly rather than hiding it inside the price of everything else, allowing people to make better choices about which ones are worth what they cost.
I saw a sibling comment mentioning about the drop curbs making the path awkwardly angled. Yeah they can be a real pain. Pushing a pram along on an angled path is hell on the wrists. But a lot of the troublesome ones are the wider ones for people to get their cars up to their front door.
Makes you think about how hard just going down the road with a wheelchair is.
Try going for a run along a pavement with frequent curb cuts, it's not pleasant. UK dropped curbs are somewhat less of a trip hazard but are so frequent in towns that you end up running with an ankle at an angle.
One "weird" complaint that I have with some accessibility features is that they mount things so that wheelchair users (and children) can operate them, e.g. a ATM mounted at groin height. I'm fairly tall so now I struggle to operate them or have to bend in unnatural angles. It's a small price to pay to make the world navigable to others, but almost daily I run into things that "are clearly designed by idiots". That is until I remember that the average person is below 180cm and right handed.
Even if this is not the case for some weird reason - don't you agree that making the world a little bit more accessible for people who have a really hard time getting around is worth making the world just a tiny little bit less accessible for you - the person who can litterally run around?
If you have a considerable problem with tripping often though, maybe look at how you do running.
My most unpleasant experience so far has been during my daily public heavy deadlifting routine. When I place my barbell on the edge of the curb, which my particular style of lifting requires, it's placed at an angle so my back got messed up and it's all the fault of these curb cutting measures.
It's all fine and dandy you want to assist children and handicapped people, but it'll be at the expense of regular users of the pavement which use it for completely sane and normal activities.
Just make sure you alternate which side of the road you are running on somewhat evenly so you are getting the benefit on both sides.
My conclusion, as always, is that U.S.-Americans and Brits do not walk. Otherwise these design choices do not make any sense.
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.
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.
It turns a complicated phone into a much more simple one. Both kids and the elderly can benefit from it.
My only issue is that the was only introduced in 2024, so older iPhones can’t benefit.
I got an iPad 2 found in a drawer that would be perfectly good if the software could at least be easily unlocked so you could only hope to install an alternative OS since they don't want to update it themselves. Or if they allowed installing stuff from outside their store.
But no, the thing runs an ancient WebKit and that's pretty much your only way to run custom code on this stuff.
I can't even create an apple account from this stuff anymore, and apple won't let me create an apple account from any other device I have. Which could possibly help with jail breaking it. And it would already be a pain to be able to create an apple account because they require a name, a birth date, a phone number, an email address... All this to access a store from which nothing would work anyway for an old device like this.
So, fuck them.
And android increasingly becomes like this too.
Meanwhile, you can still run an up to date Linux on a laptop from the 90s.
Looking forward to MDM support on GrapheneOS.
It sucks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45171200 iPhone dumbphone 10 months ago 399 comments
Is it really not possible to do this with a non-Apple machine?
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.
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.
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.
> making iOS windows
Baseless claims.
Simplify the iPhone home screen with large icons for kids or seniors:
Settings > Accessibility > General section at the very bottom > Assistive Access
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.
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.
Does this do anything else ? Or make the app list when you go fully right different ?
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.
I guess point and shoot cameras also had those mirrors back then.
Glad to know that kids rediscovered camera selfies.
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...
Its draconian not because selfies are a fundamental need, but because they seem harmless. Rules should be justifiable.
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.
> 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.
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.
When making claims like this, please remember that this is a very international group of people and scope your point appropriately: "has become highly stigmatized in the US"
This is not a problem in large parts of Europe (can't comment about elsewhere). The reason this scoping is important is because the solutions are different for "this is a problem in all of society" compared to "this is a problem in the US".
(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.
Knocking out someones teeth would necessitate filing charges
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 :).
He walked home by himself - maybe 500 meters… For us Europeans it was nothing to notice really, but the Americans were absolutely shocked.
America is big, and parts of it can be very different.
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.
That distance for a walk should be seen as fine by most Americans at that age. Although, I find it’s rare that we socialize much with people that close. Those would be neighbors and neighbors aren’t frequently socializing to this degree.
I see plenty of 11 year olds in the US without any parental supervision while in public.
I mean kids get jobs at 12?
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.
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.
It’s a bit more nuanced than “one can get around the rules.
So yeah, they're basically saying "one can get around the rules" and nothing more than that. Therefore, there is no argument here, just a truism.
>generally speaking
I felt like I couched and prefaced enough that somebody wouldn’t read this and go “this guy thinks you literally can’t ban teens from anything ever,” which is a ridiculous stance that no reasonable person would hold. I’ll be more explicit in the future.
Wholesale banning teens from screens is generally highly ineffective, like many but not all things people try to prohibit at that age. It leads to their seeking it elsewhere, perhaps in less safe environments and certainly with less guidance. It also means they won’t communicate about it with their parents, which has a lot of bad secondary effects.
Personally, if my kid experiences or witnesses something disturbing (or illegal/potentially dangerous) when they are young, I want to make sure the lines of communication stay open between us so I can help - or at least help them process it - when they need me.
TL;DR: banning smartphones when they can easily access them elsewhere is almost certainly going to end in a net negative. I am not saying we can’t ban anything. That is a ridiculous interpretation of my comment. I hope this clears that up for you.
The intention of the iPad was to watch some educational videos, check out books, magazines from the library.
They still have occasional access but only with direct active supervision (i.e we are next to them vs we are making dinner).
As they get older, we will revisit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It applies solely to Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.
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.
Of course, this says nothing about the many kids who will be hurt by being denied access to social media, such as the many gay or trans kids living in conservative families that found some solace in online communities that would accept the real selves they otherwise have to hide.
Ideal scenario? Meta decides it's not worth operating in my country, geoblocks us, and pulls their apps from the app stores.
I'm sympathetic to the people who get real value from meta platforms, but on balance, I see meta as a massively negative force, and their business model and leadership make it effectively un-fixable.
Excellent education
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 -
I still need some smartphone for work. Got the smallest one possible so at least games aren't really fun.
In this case, seems pretty topical to just take the phone away entirely for a few days.
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.
We did have Notepad though. Notepad -> open file -> explorer -> enter URL -> internet explorer -> internets.
Not long after we both got an operating system installed on our removable drive (which we had to pay like 200+ euros for across four years and we barely used it), and bootable Linux CDs became a thing too so the protections were completely moot.
Going to go and give my mum a call now!
I'm not holding my breath. I plan on eye surgery.
Presbyopia: https://www.aoa.org/healthy-eyes/eye-health-for-life/adult-v...
Affected world population: "Whereas the presbyopic population is expected to increase from approximately 2.1 billion people currently2 to more than 4 billion people in 2050 (approximately 40% of the world’s population)3"
https://presbyopia.worldcouncilofoptometry.info/standardofca...
1. Call mom, 2. Call dad. 3. Call Auntie.
These kid's phones were very common, inexpensive and worked great.
Lots of neat features hiding beneath the surface!
I forgot to turn it off and it auto-answered an AI spam bot and apparently they had a 10m conversation with my TV yesterday.
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.
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
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.
Plus when my kids lose it in a bag somewhere I can use find my instead of wasting an hour digging around.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
The perfect dumb phone is just a dumb phone. (Bonus, they're an order of magnitude cheaper than a decent smartphone).
Still a touch screen, those aren't always the best for kids to tap away furiously on.
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.
Parenting is hard. Parenting when everything is changing so quickly is very difficult.
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.
So, Find My is invaluable for locating it again.
Comaps sure doesn't.
Very odd take given that you can block access to safari with iOS screen time as well...
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.
My guess is that its a bad look for PR to essentially say that a feature designed for disability assistance = children.
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.
Corporations are not known for "normalizing" something at risk of billions of dollars of profit. That is never going to change. Sure once something starts to get acceptance they have no problem shouting from the rooftop about how they were first but they never sound the trumpet.
If you are not aware the CEO of Apple (Tim Cook). Lived most of his life as a closeted LGBQ due to discrimination. Even though he is CEO of one of the richest companies in the world Apple has not become a leading champing of LGBQIA+ rights. Because they are afraid it would not be profitable. That's how companies operate.