Fixed - Why is Snapchat still able to be used when phone is in Downtime?

For starters, thanks to the very few of us as parents that seem to care deeply about our children and what they are exposed to. I have been working with my boys for a year on earning phone privileges, eventually allowing them to have less restrictions as they demonstrate responsibility. I think I solved this one and it required my son coming clean. I setup both downtime and app limits on my 14 year old son’s phone. Everything worked for a few months. Then, I noticed he was using snap and messages well beyond his limits. I checked all the screen time limits and was puzzled, everything seemed to be setup correctly. SnapChat and messages still were allowed. After an hour of reading these forums, rebooting, deleting, reinstalling, my son had the courage to come clean.

I did not set “Block at Downtime” for Downtime. If this is not set, anyone can simply override the downtime setting for an app during the downtime period. Without this set, my son was waking up early while downtime was enforced and enabling messages, espn, and SnapChat for the entire day. When he set this, it overrides App Limits, leading you to believe that App Limits are not working for a specific app. After downtime limits turn off for the day, for example, after 7:30 AM, then iOS enforces App Limits. At this point, iOS enforces the App Limits and my son could not override. This made it look like App Limits in iOS had a glitch, it worked for some apps and not others.

I enabled “Block at Downtime” on his phone and verified all settings worked. I had a very good chat with my son about it and it has turned into a powerful learning lesson about trust and responsibility. Hopefully, this is helpful to other parents.