How does complex or conflicting App Limits work on iOS?

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How does complex or conflicting App Limits work on iOS?

I'm finding very little information on complex/competing App Limits, and finding the configuration quite limiting in use. I would love to be able to set both "limits" but also exclusions. Has anyone any experience with this? More specifically:

1) Does the order of the rules play any difference (I assume not, since it's impossible to re-order them)?

I'd love to be able to add specific "allowances" to the top of the list, with a more generic "catch all" at the end. For example, allowing 15 min gaming time and 30 min reading time at the top but then setting a "must request" block (i.e. 1 min limit for "All Apps & Categories") at the end to ensure they need to send a request to get more time.

2) Assuming order does not play a role - If I have an app included in two different categories, one with a 30 min limit, and one with a 1h limit, will that app be blocked after 30 minutes or 1 hour?

While categories are great, not all apps are categorized correctly. Some educational apps are still labeled as "Games" and some obvious games as "Educational". So I want to give the general "Games" a 15 min allowance, but then override this and give specific educational game-labeled apps 30 min. Of course, one could create manual categories for all games and for all educational apps, but this will be tedious to maintain (and defeat the purpose of the categories altogether).

3) How does the "All Apps & Categories" work - if I set that to "1 min" (lowest possible), will that then invalidate all other rules? What happens if a specific app (or category) has a longer limit, will it still require permission to use because the "All Apps & Categories" would block it first?

I was hoping to use this as a catch-all-others (i.e. block all apps that are not given specific app limits), but it seems this can only be used as an "override-all-others" (i.e. block apps no matter if they have a longer individual limit).

Posted on Jun 27, 2022 5:46 AM

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Johannes-Island__ Author

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Jul 20, 2022 6:49 AM in response to Johannes-Island__

The support pages from Apple does not answers these questions specifically, but these are my findings after experimenting.

The main two things to understand is that [a] these rules are "limits", now "allowances", and [b] the rules can be considered as "buckets" and apps are blocked if they belong to a "full bucket". Thus:

If an app is included in multiple rules, it will be blocked as soon as any of the rules it belongs to "fires".
Whenever an app is used, time will "count up" on each rule that that app is included in. The "All Apps & Categories" will count up as soon as any app is used.

So, the specific answers to my questions would be:

1) The order of rules does not matter.

2) If apps are included in multiple rules, it will be blocked as soon as the "shortest" rule has been met. Thus, an app included in a 30 min rule and 1h rule will be blocked after 30 min. HOWEVER, the "1h rule" will now be "30 min full" and still allow 30 more minutes for other apps in that rule (that are not yet blocked in other rules).

3) If "All Apps & Categories" is shorter than any other rule, any other rule is "moot" after that time since the AA&C will already block all apps. Adding longer limits to specific apps does not help since they are already blocked by the AA&C. Thus, the AA&C should be used as a "backup catch-all" ensuring that no matter what, this is the maximum app usages this day, not as a generic blocker.

Also note that there are some apps that are not available to set a limit on. These include the system apps Clips, Clock, FindMy, iMovie and Magnifier, but also the Netflix and Gmail does not show up in my limits list.

And this is how I ended configuring my system for my (8 year old):

1) A selection of games are given 30 min allowance per day

2) Educational Games are given 1h allowance per day. HOWEVER, all games from #1 are also included here, so that he will be maxed out at 1h for (educational + non-educational) games, and not 30m+1h per day.

5) AA&C is set to 2h. This allows him an additional hour for utility apps and a lot of reading apps.

6) Any other games or apps that we don't want him to use too much without our approval is set into a "1 min" rule. If he wants to use these he needs to send a request to us to use them.

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