Apple Screen Time app limits not working

I’ve contacted apple and the problem is resolved by doing the below steps:

1. Turn off screen time for the device that is needing to be blocked for downtime (childs device)
2. Make sure all pictures have synced with iCloud or they will be lost (scroll to bottom of photos app to check if any pending) sign out of iCloud on all devices that can either approve screen time requests or have screen time limitations (child and parents)
3. reset the same devices (not erase content, just reset all settings by going to settings > transfer or reset iPhone > reset > reset all settings)
4. sign back in to iCloud on all devices
5. turn screen time back on and set downtime limits
6. everything should be working normally now and stay as is

Ugh, the Screen Time glitch issue. We had problems with this on my iPhone, until a little over three years ago when I turned 18 and my parents changed my account status from “child” to “guardian”. Now at that point I no longer used Screen Time limits, but I had younger siblings who did (still do) so I began to look into the cause and solution to this issue. Here are the steps I took to fix the issue. (I know some people are going to look at the first step and say “already tried that, didn’t work” but hear me out.)

1. Reset the child’s device… but make sure to do a backup first! No need to completely erase it and set it up again from scratch - that DIDN’T help. All you’re doing is wiping it to clear away any corrupted files and persistent bugs in the software causing errors. So, Run. A. Backup.
2. Once it’s reset, restore from the last backup, which will bring back everything as it was before/as you set it up. If you set up restrictions and Screen Time limits, these will appear as expected.
3. This is the hardest one according to most people I’ve spoken with, not to mention inconvenient. Try NOT to change restrictions/screen time settings of the child’s device. Every time you do, you run the risk of confusing the system again, which will result in limits disappearing or restrictions not taking effect. Because of this we took care to restrict only what was completely necessary so that we wouldn’t have to constantly make changes to allow full functionality when it was required.
4. I advise avoiding the “reward” method: “You were well-behaved today, so I’ll postpone DownTime for an extra hour this evening and give you 20 more minutes on your YouTube time limit.” After a few times of this, you’ll find the system is messed up again. Instead, our family started implementing a physical “phone away” time (9:00 PM in our case), and on good-behavior days, the kids are allowed to use their phones for an extra hour or two. In no case do we allow use after 11:00 PM, so DownTime is set for 11:00 PM to 7:00 AM. Of course this will vary from family to family, but the goal here is to minimize changing Screen Time settings if possible. And as kids get older and more mature and certain restrictions become unnecessary, we’ve removed them as needed, which did result in two or three times of the settings getting messed up, but in that case we just reset and restored the phones again.

I know that this method, especially numbers 3 and 4, is unsatisfactory compared to the ideal: the system working as intended and not having problems. However, since that isn’t the case, this has been the second-best option for us and will continue to be until Apple gets this patched up.

I hope this helps.

I found a fix (for me at least). Had struggled for months and months and tried lots of solutions and multiple calls with Apple.

The solution that has worked for the last few weeks is the following (prior to this, limits disappeared every 1-2 days).

Upgrade ALL DEVICES for ALL Apple FAMILY MEMBERS to the current operating systems.

I had done this before for my devices and for the kids devices…but did not ask my Mom to upgrade her devices and she was one of the Apple Family Members. I feel that was the difference this time. It didn’t occur to me that her IOS would affect App Limits, but I think that was the difference.

The only thing that works for me is to only make changes on my kid’s devices. If I use my phone to make changes, it messes it all up. I have reset all devices and have worked with apple tech support extensively. My kids devices were working well that way UNTIL I put Roblox back on one- it is an app I own but shared via family sharing. It immediately made all settings to completely bonkers on all the devices, not even just the one with the roblox download. I deleted it and reset everything through the iPads (not my phone) and it took a few re-do’s but is now working again. It’s terrible.

Hey all,

I have had this issue for months and finally figured out what triggers the reappearing of deleted (or changed) app limits.

This behaviour is caused by devices associated with any of your family member's iCloud IDs that don't belong to you. My daughter had some friends' AirPods and an old iPhone she hadn't used for years associated with her ID. My wife had a no-longer existing iPad associated.

After removing all non-used devices from Find My, everything returned to normal immediately. I didn't need to reset devices or login/logout from iCloud - everything just worked again.

Please try it and let me know if it works for you.

Cheers

Andreas

I might have found a solution to this very annoying bug. Once you set the App limit, if you re-open it again, it will show you the "Block at the end" option. I wanted to remove previous app limits and reset them properly. However, it seems that if the "Block at the end" was not marked, the removal would not complete successfully and the app limit would re-appear. So, I went into each of my previous set app limits and mark them as "Block at the end". Then I came out and re-entered each of them, and removed them. Finally I re-added the limit I wanted now for my kids, saved, and then added "Block at the end limit" option. Now, it seems like all my settings have remained as they should.

After looking at the app for hours, I have my own ideas of several bugs: contrasting versions of the settings which override each other (perhaps saved on load balance websites, or partially locally spread on the devices) when cannot reconcile, with older version ending over-riding newer versions.

Next, the Block at the end option is completely un-necessary, obviously if we set a limit is to block at the end. By having this function not showing at first when you set up the limit, it remains unclear what the default is.

And now, it seems to me that when the limit is not marked to block at the end, there is another bug which prevents the admin to remove this limit successfully.

A legacy of irritating factors completely unacceptable from a customer service company like Apple, given the amount of people complaining about this.

Our solution was to remove a parent / guardian in family settings so that there’s only the organiser in control of the screen time settings.

Go to Settings / Family (it’s at the top below Apple ID) .. then select the user and turn off parent / guardian.

Not ideal but we were pulling our hair out trying to solve this using all the recommended online solutions but two weeks in and this finally seems to be doing it. No idea why Apple hasn’t addressed this though. It’s such a big big issue for parents these days.

Not sure this is relevant or not but I should also point out that my wife logged off and on to her Apple ID on her laptop (as she had bought a new computer). When she did it suddenly about 40 historic ‘app limit’ settings appeared which we had been adding repeatedly because they kept disappearing. They were back!

To clarify the issue seemed to be that having two parents controlling the screen time was causing conflicts. Solution was to go into family settings and remove the user designated as 'Parent / Guardian' and keep the user designated as 'Organiser'. Would love to know if this works for anyone else.

We tried everything to solve this and I think we figured out some reasons

for distracting the app limit and solutions:

Restrict the time and date change.

do not allow to change the account.

put app limit to age.

restrict change passcode

the kids can use some other apps to navigate the internet. My kids used to use bus app and The Times (news app) to access instagram, YouTube and other websites despite Safari is restricted.

the latest issue I had was that the phone was resetting itself and allow all after few hours from the restriction. That was because my beloved child find a trick by putting emoji as phone name (rather than their name) so iCloud get confused to apply the restrictions.

Also, they found out that VPN can stop restrictions from accessing the phone.

i am not high tech person but these things which we found so far, I hope apple will work to fix these issues.

I literally just now saw an option to update to iOS 16.5 and one of the update items says “Fixes an issue where Screen Time settings may reset or not sync across all devices”

let’s see…

It’s all of the devices. It won’t help until they push a fix after iOS 16.2.

1.) Update all devices (if needed)

2.) Turn off Screen Time on ALL devices

3.) Shut down all devices & wait a minute or 2

3.) Restart devices and enable Screen Time for each child

The above steps will usually fix any kink in Screen Time. The problem is that it broke in iOS 16 and has not been fixed as of iOS 16.2. It is now considered a known issue to Apple engineers. So I’ve been checking daily for updates. Good luck!

For disappearing or ignored app limits, I found a workaround that seems to be working.

1. Turn off screen time on all devices.
2. Restart all devices.
3. Set up screen time on the kids' devices.

This has held up for about five days. 1 minute app seems to work. The downside is that I have no way to adjust settings remotely from my phone. So I have to have their phones in hand to change any settings or extend any times for them.

And I can't see their screen time until they turn in their phones at night. But that's better than resetting the app limits multiple times per day.

I started controlling the Screen Time settings for our daughter from the Mac, and noticed that I always had 10-12 different (apparently old) versions of App Limits in the list that kept coming back, no matter how ofter I deleted them on the Mac.

Yesterday I tried resetting all devices that could change Screen Time settings for my daughter as well as her iPhone and iPad. That didn't help for us, and then I tried the following which finally worked:

1. got all parent devices out within view (2x iPhone, 2x iPad), switched them on and entered Screen Time, also on the Mac
2. changed to App Limits on the Mac, deleted the limits I didn't need/changed them as required and checked that they were deleted/changed on all devices (might take a while until updated everywhere)

My problem was that I had never made sure the new limits where actually valid on all devices, so the old ones kept creeping back.

Since I did this, only the limits I want are in the list.

Hope this helps for some of the issues reported.

I was just talking with an Apple Support technician, about the collection of issues around Family Sharing/ScreenTime. I also referenced this Apple Community thread. He said our engineers are aware of it, are actively working on it and expect to release a fix in iOS 16.4.2, in about a week. 🙏🏼

He also shared good advice about making sure your devices are backed up before performing any iOS/MacOS updates 🤓

Our solution was to remove a parent / guardian in family settings so that there’s only the organiser in control of the screen time settings.

Go to Settings / Family (it’s at the top below Apple ID) .. then select the user and turn off parent / guardian.

Not ideal but we were pulling our hair out trying to solve this using all the recommended online solutions but two weeks in and this finally seems to be doing it. No idea why Apple hasn’t addressed this though. It’s such a big big issue for parents these days.