Screen Time Buggy and SLOW!

Settings for child devices constantly reset to blank. Usage activity is extremely slow to load. Approving additional time for apps works about 70% of the time. Screen time requests don’t show up on my Wife’s phone who is also set up as a parent. The list goes on. It’s great when it works, but generally speaking it is one of the buggiest features I’ve ever encountered from Apple.


We are all on very current hardware running the latest releases of iOS as of the time of this writing. We are connected over gigabit fiber. We have a mesh Wi-Fi system which is extremely solid. It is not a bandwidth issue. It is not a hardware issue. It’s not an outdated-OS issue.


Please don’t respond with canned responses that don’t actually solve the problem. The problem cant be solved on my end. Many others have reported this issue. This is clearly a problem iOS+server-side that Apple needs to rectify. It’s obvious that few within Apple actually use this feature. If they did, they would notice all of these bugs right away. It’s barely usable.

Posted on May 27, 2023 12:52 PM

Reply
8 replies

Jun 3, 2023 1:07 PM in response to ForceBlast

I have the same issue. Screentime is extremely slow.


you mention that it also resets to blank, I suspect -that- is not the case.


screentime takes extremely long to load, if you wait (this can take more then a minute!) until it is loaded (you know its loaded when date/time under the graph is of “now”) then the settings are there, if you click thru to the settings earlier then they appear empty…


”the good thing” is that that brings the issue down to it beiing extremely slow…


it hapens on wifi and mobile, it happens on different wifi. Both my wif and 5g connection are plenty fast and I have no other issues with connections or speed. Changing dns servers does not help either.


Firstly the whole thing is way to slow and that must be an apple backend server thing..


its also not helping that the thing does not update in the background (and yes: settings are correct, toggling them does not work and battery saving is also off).


furthermore this has been the vase for months in my case. I currently running the beta but the issue was the same whencI was on the latest regular release.


My kids have SE2 phones, I have a 14pro and my wife had an 11pro.


issue arises for me and her and with both kids.

Aug 17, 2023 4:29 AM in response to ForceBlast

I have this same exact problem, it has always been like this (for over a year now). And it is like this on all my kids devices, which is an iPad, iPhone 13 and an iPhone 12, all on the latest iOS versions. I myself use an iPhone 14 pro.


On top of it being extremly slow, it switches between sending me an message and screentime actually sending an notification when my kids request more time for an app.


This is actually so frustrating that I'm thinking about going back to android and use Google Family link instead, I used that prior to this and it worked flawless.

Question marked as Helpful

Sep 1, 2023 3:56 PM in response to ForceBlast

Yes, Screen time is absolutely a NIGHTMARE to use. And always has been for me. Here's what I have to do. Open up screentime in the settings. Then completely close the settings app (swipe up from the bottom of the screen and pause in the center of the screen, then swipe up on the settings app to close it).

Now open the settings app again and go do your screentime stuff. It will still be slow as molasses, but this forces screentime to reconnect/refresh and helps speed it up for some reason. I have to do this before changing settings for each person in screentime though.


APPLE! please fix your bugs!

Sep 3, 2023 12:01 PM in response to ForceBlast

I too, am sick of this, it's been so bad for so long, I cannot believe they are ok with leaving it this way.

My main issue is the client/server way they have designed it. If you toggle a setting, like changing the time downtime is set to activate, you can change the time in the interface, but it will not actually change it in the backend. You have to leave it on that screen for an abritrary amount of time between 10 seconds and 20 minutes, and at some point it may or may not 'take'. So you can toggle something, back out of the interface, go back to it and the setting will not have changed.

I think my kids will have grown up and left home by the time they fix this ! :-( >:-(

Question marked as Helpful

Sep 15, 2023 7:41 PM in response to ForceBlast

Thank you Forceblast!! You saved my day. Perfect post. Perfectly described . Now I know I am correct when I ask the same questions. Super frustrating that we can have such a flawed key functionality in place. I actually try to use it to its full abilities but I have seen these issue for a long time now.


Many are coming up with all other misleading responses that just distract everyone of the real issue.


So, my kids become adults before Apple will solve the issue.

Screen Time Buggy and SLOW!

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