Parental Controls -Limit Applications not Saving or Applying Settings

Apple has just responded:

"Engineering has determined that your bug report (35490409) is a duplicate of 10534135 and will be closed. " The status of 10534135 is "OPEN".

This issue is a known problem with OS X.

I just tested this same thing on a brand new Macbook Pro running High Sierra and it fails the same way: "check boxes would not remain saved." Yes, I created a managed user, not a standard user. It also fails for us on an older Macbook Pro running High Sierra, and a Mac Mini running El Capitan... all fail the same way.

Parental Controls on the Mac don't work.

@tekfranz: It's absurd (sorry, not you... the situation). We are not responsible for Apple doing their job!

My friend just bought a brand new MacBook Pro running High Sierra. It took me 5 minutes to test this and confirm there is a problem... the check-box selections for limiting applications don't save properly (yes, I created a managed user, not a standard user.) It's as if you can make selections, but OS X sort of ignores that and changes your selections to what it wants. The result is that apps will run that were not selected.

I just got a reply from Apple to my bug report #35490409:

It has not been determined how or when the issue will be resolved.

... The original report on this issue, Bug ID 20024192, is still under investigation.

Fascinating. One would expect at the least for Apple to report that this will definitely be fixed in the next update to El Capitan, Sierra, and High Sierra. They don't know how to resolve the issue? Under investigation? For how many years?! It's just a simple failure that can very easily be reproduced. I've been in IT for 35 years and I'm a former senior software engineer. This is silliness. Further, it appears now that there are two prior bug reports for this bug: 10534135 and 20024192. Apple is now referring to the bug as Bug ID 20024192.

I am still waiting for a call back, in response to my call to Apple Care on Dec. 11.

Dear Apple, we need parental controls working on OS X now!

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Yeah, maybe I will file a bug report [ https://bugreport.apple.com/web ]. But there's no way Apple doesn't already know about something this basic. A basic feature of the "world's most advanced operating system" doesn't work – go figure. This problem has existed at least since El Capitan (2015).

I already attempted to contact Apple about this, through their customer support chat. The chat window itself has major glitches, so each time I was starting to get somewhere with one of the technicians, the chat window would mysterious just close. Sometimes it would say "You've been disconnected from the Advisor due to a network issue." Other times, it was a glitch in the UI of the chat window... hitting backspace to delete text closed the chat window! Sometimes the chat would end these ways, other times it just ended for no reason... poof! After many attempts, I gave up.

@tekfranz, I think this is really on Apple now to do the right thing. The quality of OS X is at stake, because you can't have an active feature like this in the OS that simply doesn't work. That's not the right way to market software. Apple must be fully aware of the problem. I am guessing the problem predates El Capitan, as evidenced by the bug number. As far as I know, the bug numbers are sequential, so 10534135 may be quite old.

If you couple this with the fact that Apple is supposedly the most profitable company in the world, it makes one think how is it possible that their world-class operating system has dysfunctional parental controls? Don't get me wrong – I love Apple, but the gloss is getting glossier (and glassier), while the substance is showing some serious signs of decay. They've made some very strange design choices lately, too, for example the new MacBook Pro with its single type of physical port – Thunderbolt. Sleek, yes. Practical, no.

Hi all.

I have this problem too (macOS 10.13.2), and not only in limiting applications, but also for other section of the parental control (the time constraints for example, but also Others).

With the guest account parental controls seem working correctly, but this is not the case for a standard user.

Please, we need to have this fixed! It's incredible that such a bug is still in the wild!

Hope someone from Apple will answer to our call.

Thanks,

Alessandro

I just got off the phone with Apple Care. I was on hold for most of 1 hour.

They didn't give me any information yet. The last person I spoke with said they would contact the appropriate department and I asked for a call back.

I'm having this same problem. I want to create a second account on my MacBook Air (macOS Sierra 10.12.4 (16E195)) that acts solely as a console to open a couple of websites in Chrome. I've configured a user account as a managed user and applied parental controls to use the simple finder, restrict apps to Google Chrome, and to limit the websites that can be visited. When I switch to the managed user account, I get hundreds of errors saying that apps can't be accessed, when I try to launch Chrome it tells me that there is no permission, and when I attempt to connect to wifi the http://captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html web page won't load. I've tried recreating the account several times but no luck. Anyone know how to resolve this?

I have just submitted bug report #35490409, "parental controls don't work - easy to reproduce".