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iOS 17.1 Improves Screen Time Syncing Across Apple Devices

WaterOz said:
I wish they'd move the kid's screen time requests back out of messages. Drives me crazy thinking I have new messages and then it's just more screen time requests. Wish it would have its own app to go in and approve the screen time. Past that and the occasional bug though, managing my kid's iPad usage through Screen Time has been a great experience (compared to other solutions I had tried)
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I actually love this feature update with iOS 17 - soooo much better than having to search through my phone to see what I missed and approve!
 
spinedoc77 said:
PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!! let this be true finally! Now they just need to fix my AW not getting any screentime requests, after hours of email support and engineers looking at it they still can't figure it out.
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agree with this!
 
They tried to fix this in 16.5? I couldn't tell. This feature has been broken forever. At least before my kids are old enough to vote. Be interesting to see if this improves.

I still have an old device that won't disappear from Screentime. Yes, it's gone from every other place.

Just buggy
 
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Screentime limits have been very helpful at times with my kids. However, it was a real hassle when, if I needed to manually turn on/off --- which happened very often because our schedule is so varied that scheduling times was really insufficient most of the time --- I'd have to wait 1 to 15 minutes(!) for the change to work. You could click the button. No feedback. And just wait a long time. Sometimes I could make the change on their own device, with my parental passcode. But even that sometimes wouldn't work for 1 to 15 minutes or so. The amount of delay was mindboggling and a usability bug that got to the point where now I don't use it. It was great and super useful when it worked.

But why, by iOS 16, couldn't they get it working better/reliably?!

I would still welcome if it started working again, though my kids continue to get older and so I would not use it as much.
 
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Ridge Racer said:
I just wish they'd let you set more than one DownTime period in a day. I need at a minimum two - one for school time and one for bedtime.
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Yeah, I had a similar issue. I ended up scheduling it to be down... all the time except for a minute about 2am and then manually turning it on/off for my kids during the day. Which might have worked well except for unbearable delays as I mentioned in another comment.

Oh, and one thing I didn't say earlier, that the manual on/off override would have been fine and good if it worked, but even then, it was a pretty crazy amount of button presses on the parent phone. This use case should have been better thought out. But again, it was so painful to wait for manual on/off to work, that I had to abandon it anyway because of the bugs.
 
Rookwood said:
However, it was a real hassle when, if I needed to manually turn on/off --- which happened very often because our schedule is so varied that scheduling times was really insufficient most of the time --- I'd have to wait 1 to 15 minutes(!) for the change to work. You could click the button. No feedback. And just wait a long time.
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I found a workaround that works reliably most of the time, at least for me.

Go to the Screen Time setting and click the child’s name.

Now, just wait on that screen until the “Updated” date and time (just below the “Daily Average” panel) matches the current time.

Now you can click the Downtime setting and change it to what you want.

It is still time-consuming and super frustrating, but at least it doesn’t fail very often.
 
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Arctic Moose said:
I found a workaround that works reliably most of the time, at least for me.

Go to the Screen Time setting and click the child’s name.

Now, just wait on that screen until the “Updated” date and time (just below the “Daily Average” panel) matches the current time.

Now you can click the Downtime setting and change it to what you want.

It is still time-consuming and super frustrating, but at least it doesn’t fail very often.
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Thanks. I think that's what I was often doing. Waiting for that screen to come alive with current info, and then the button would often work. Problem was needing to wait 1-15 min for that screen to come alive. So, it's probably all the same delay somewhere in Apple's system. I'm hoping once I can update to iOS 17, maybe thing will be better?

(Except my eldest loves the iPhone X hand-me-down and doesn't want to transition to an 11Pro hand-me-down! He even got me to have the battery replaced so he could continue on with the X. So, no iOS 17 for him. Not sure what the implications of that are for any Screentime improvements. I guess I'll find out.)
 
Just installed both iOS 17.1 and macOS 14.1. Issues with syncing app activity are still around. Did anyone notice any improvements besides quicker updates?

On my mac it doesn't report any activity from my iPhone while the other way around it just works fine.
 
Jilave321 said:
Just installed both iOS 17.1 and macOS 14.1. Issues with syncing app activity are still around. Did anyone notice any improvements besides quicker updates?

On my mac it doesn't report any activity from my iPhone while the other way around it just works fine.
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ZERO improvement, the deleted app limits are still there. Installed 2 nights ago, yesterday morning limits deleted. Redid the limits and this morning they were deleted again.
 
Menn, I don't know why I still get excited about reading about bug fixes or improvements from Apple 😆 In July they also released an update that should have fixed syncing and the random deletion of screen time settings. I guess I will have to lower my expectations. Maybe it will get fixed in five years. In their defence, the did fix a nasty bug that was giving me headaches for months in iOS 17, but it feels like every release introduces more bugs than actual useful features.
 
So installed iOS 17.1.1 and its broken screen time for me

I got a new m3 Mac. So a week ago I prepared my m1 for sale and 2 days ago I setup my m3.

All was working good until the day after iOS 17.1.1 and Mac OS 14.1.1 came out.

Now either my m3 disappears from my iPhones screen time or vice versa. In any case on the Mac, iPhone usage doesn't appear and on the iPhone Mac usage doesn't dissapear

Turning off screen time on either devices syncs across and its disabled on all devices though
 
yesterday my list with allowed apps has been reset out of nowhere. I doubt I will use the feature again, because surely something will go wrong in the near future. Very frustrating this.
 
A little update. My iPhone can now see usage times from itself and the MacBook.

The MacBook can only see itself LOL. iPhone even disappears from the drop down section

What did they fix exactly?
 
Any update from all of you for the broken piece of software?!

For us (all newest iOS/macOS updates installed) it just does not work! No push messages if the child want's more time and so one... Always have to go inside Screentime manually - wait - wait - wait... and then you can find a message, that there is an update message.

So stupid! Why do they promote this stuff - it never works!
 
Nope it’s even worse now. Devices can only see its own usage. It’s like the sync to other devices option is broken

It’s one thing to have a broken feature. It’s another to launch updates that specifically fix it only to make it even more broken
 
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