App limits continually disappear in Screen Time

Well. After spending about 30 minutes with a Senior Advisor, we may have identified where the bug is and how to work around it.

The bug appears to be related to making changes in the “Family” section at the top of Settings. Don’t make changes there. Make changes directly in the Screen Time section a little bit further down in Settings. That seems to have fixed our issue.

Select Settings -> Screen Time. Select the child member in that first screen and ONLY make screen time changes there. So far so good for us.

The advisor also observed the issue in Family section and has put in a defect order. Maybe a fix will come, but at least there appears to be a workaround.

I have had this issue since early December- 2 kids with iPads, I have a 14 pro max and it seemed to coincide with my transfer to that phone. It’s like screen time is haunted and makes really weird changes in its own. I’ve literally seen settings change on their own in the moment.

I have an escalated case with Apple support- going on 3 weeks. The report as of today is that this is now a known issue, meaning it’s happening to multiple people, and they are currently investigating it.

their advice to me in the meantime is to not use my phone to manage screen time, but rather manage it directly on my kid’s devices. I have noticed that if I do ANYTHING on my phone it will set off a series of errors. If I restart the iPads and set it up just on the iPad, and don’t do ANYTHING on my phone, the settings seem to work.

hope they fix it soon, cause I’m sure a lot of kids are accessing inappropriate content!

I had this problem for months. After 24 hours or so app limits would completely turn off or disappear. Sometimes content restrictions also would turn off. I ended up resetting screen time features using my kid’s phones instead of mine. No matter the phone, you still need to enter your passcode. Setting the app limits, etc using my kids phones helped them stick and not disappear/turn off.

So I found the fix for this for my kids. It was the “share across all devices” setting. If your kids have multiple Apple products like iPhone, iPad, etc and that share across all devices setting is on, it will continually shut screen settings off and on at random.

Hope that helps!

Same issue here. On 16.4, upgrading to 16.4.1 to see if that helps at all. It does seem to stick if you do it directly on the child's device, but if you set it from a parent's device remotely it disappears within a few days. Kind of crazy that this was reported back in December and still hasn't been resolved.

I've found that the child can override it by innocently asking for "one more minute" on several apps. I can make the settings disappear in about 2 minutes doing this. It also coincided with 16.2 update which was in December 2022, I believe

I found a work around. It appears that by enabling Content & Privacy restrictions, that’s what seems to be removing the apps.

Fitness is being removed from my

kids iPad when I enable Content & Privacy Restrictions but when I disable it, Fitness returns.

I had a similar issue and found that apps and websites for installing profiles in the VPN section which was circumventing the screen time parental controls.

https://patch.com/new-jersey/ridgewood/apple-issues-ios-update-following-lawmakers-call-ridgewood-fix

It has continued to hold for us. First time in months and the only difference is we make changes and view statistics in Screen Time, never going into Famlly first and then Screen Time.

Has anybody tried the 16.4 update? Seems to have been stable for the last few days and the parental settings seem to have persisted so far

I wanted to submit a follow up comment. The issue seems to have started for me when I updated to iOS 16.2 (iPhone 14 Pro). My daughter’s iPhone 14 was still on iOS 16.1. While we were having this issue, her approval requests would come through Messages, which they did not before the issue started.

I updated her phone to 16.2 a few weeks ago and the issue seems resolved for us. We no longer receive requests through Messages either.

Does this mean that the next update will cause the same problem if we don’t update her phone at the same time?

Also having this issue, I’ll carefully set App Limit rules for my child and they’ll function for a few days. Randomly within 1-3 days they all are completely wiped as and the App Limit rules are all gone

I’ve noticed iCloud believes my child has two devices Apple IPhone (2) which physically does not exist. This phantom duplicate device is somehow hosing screen time as well

The 16.4 update worked for us. I have 2 iPads and control them from my 14pro max. It was REALLY bad before the 16.4 update but since then, I’ve tried all sorts of things that would have previously thrown all the settings off but they’ve held. Very relieved and also frustrated and perplexed that it wasn’t a fix for everyone.

This has been happening for months now and it is causing havoc to the point I’m about to switch from apple.

I noticed that when screen time is working and enabled and even if downloading apps is restricted, my kid can search for the app, and if it was previously downloaded, they can redownload it. It has to be pressed quickly, but if that’s successful, it seems to not only allow uninstalled apps to be installed but then also results in screen time limits being eliminated as soon as it installs.

Has anyone else noticed anything similar?