iOS 18 & Screen Time: What Parents Should Know

iOS 18, released in September 2024, continues the discouraging trend of making iOS harder for parents to lockdown safely for kids. If possible, we recommend keeping your kids devices on iOS 16 or 17 until Apple fixes these issues.

Problem #1: #images GIF search still not deletable

Well over a year ago, we reported that iOS 17 introduced a serious regression in parental controls for iOS, namely the fact that parents lost the ability to disallow the #images iMessage app built into the Messages texting app. This app is filled with sexual and innappropreate GIFs, and allows kids to search for and see thousands of animated GIFs from pop culture, including many that are sexual or violent.

Apple still doesn't let parents block this mini-app...

...where it's easy for kids to find explicit animated GIFs

In iOS 17, there was one hacky workaround: by setting the device to essentially always be in Downtime (by setting a schedule for Downtime to be on from 3:01am until 3:00am every day), this GIF search stopped working. But in using this hack, parents also lose the important ability to use Downtime for its intended purpose, and all apps must be set to Always Allowed.

Sadly, our preliminary testing shows that this workaround no longer works in iOS 18. Apart from switching to Supervised mode which is much more technically challenging than using Screen Time, there seems to be no current workaround.

Apple has known about this issue for well over a year, so it's unclear why they haven't yet fixed it.

Problem #2: Kids can enable Spotlight internet searches

In iOS 18, Apple introduced a new top-level area in the Settings app, called Search. In that screen, users can toggle a setting labled Show Related Content, as shown here:

Screen Time does not protect this new Settings screen

When this setting is enabled, kids can see image and text previews from the web when they search from their phone.

Screen Time can not prevent these search results

These search results are shown even if the parent has removed Safari and set Web Content to Allowed Websites Only. While it seems that Apple does not return search results for obviously sexual or pornographic terms, it still represents a major hole in parental controls. Hopefully this was just an oversight in the rush of many engineering teams preparing for the new release, but time will tell.

Problem 3#: Screen Time won't enforce VPN settings

Another problem Apple has known about for years is that Screen Time does not let parents enforce VPN. While Gertrude does not employ a VPN, it is a common technique for parental controls and accountability software, as it allows highly effective website blocking. Apple devices allow parents to install VPNs on their kids devices, but they do nothing to stop kids or adults from disabling the VPN, rendering them useless for parental controls.

Considering that Screen Time offers many explicit options for parents to restrict kids from making changes to features like max headphone volume or driving focus, the omission of VPN settings restrictions is glaring and seems intentional.