Malaysia has become one of the first countries to prevent individuals under 16 from accessing social media sites, following Australia's lead. This feature will become standard in other countries and to make it easier to control (or monitor) children's devices, Apple introduced several new features at WWDC early this morning.
First of all, parents or guardians will receive a notification if the Screen Time code that controls access is entered on their child's device. I have a lyrical child and he once managed to guess the lock code I use. With this feature, the era of children bypassing controls because they managed to guess the lock code will end.
Next, the process of adding a child's device to be controlled by a parent's device has been improved, making it easier to do. Parents and guardians can set the account to belong to children under 16 from the start. With this, applications that minors cannot use are automatically blocked at the operating system level.
Schedule and Time Allowances
The Time Allowances feature was introduced with parents providing the time that children can use the device. Previously, time limits were set at the application level. With time allowance, children are given X amount of time and they are free to use the allowed apps during that period.
Communication Safety is improved with the ability to filter violent and horrific content when in the form of images or videos. Previously, Communication Safety only filtered pornographic content by blurring it by default.
There is also a page for parents to learn what content is appropriate for children of all ages. With this, they can judge for themselves whether the access currently granted can still be allowed or not.
Ask to Browse
Children can now request access to certain sites from parents and guardians with the Ask to Browse feature. Perhaps access to Safari was previously blocked and with Ask To Browse it is temporarily allowed.
All these new features will be enabled through the Screen Time update through iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.
