This week, software makers are gathering in Cupertino for Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). Especially interesting for parents and developers are the many updates to the parental control and kids’ safety features. The updates underscore how useful these parental control features have been for years and how they are improving. From our perspective, there are two overarching themes to the rollouts: easier defaults for parents and extensions of existing controls to more iOS features.
Easier defaults. Since 2014, Apple devices have enabled parents to select which apps their kids can access. The dashboard options during setup of a child’s device are pretty straightforward, especially for parents who want to proscribe access to virtually any app except for a select few. The announcements at WWDC include suggested default groupings of apps, including “essentials only,” giving parents some ideas about which apps to allow and which to restrict by default. Similarly, parents will now see default suggestions for Screen Time limits for specific kinds of apps. Apple developed these suggestions based on the American Academy of Pediatrics research to help guide parents on best practices for app use limits. Over time, parents can update accessible categories and Screen Time, as their child’s needs evolve.
Extensions of existing controls. Apple is also extending a range of pre-existing, successful parental controls to cover more features. More parental control options are a theme this year, giving parents more ways to manage what their kids can see, when kids have access, how parents can guide them, and who they can talk to. For example, parents will be able to condition access to specific websites on parental approval, via “Ask to Browse.” Just as parents can currently condition access to any app by their child’s device on permission via “Ask to Buy,” the new updates will enable the same permission process for access to specific websites a minor attempts to navigate to on their device’s browser. Similarly, parents who already approve messaging via “Ask to Communicate” and use “Communication Safety,” which can blur or not deliver images that may contain nudity, can now also set up this feature for images that may contain violent content or gore. Giving parents additional, detailed controls over their kids’ online experiences ensures developers have a safe ecosystem in which to build.
These parental control updates are critical indicators that the existing tools work well and are improving. With this year’s upgrades, expanded controls will make managing kids’ online experience more effective, while the suggested defaults will make the process more user-friendly.
Unfortunately, Apple users in Texas will likely have a less accessible and more frustrating experience than the rest of the world because Texas’s App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) went into effect on May 28. For parents in Texas, the process of setting up new child accounts will have more hurdles, as the App Store must prohibit a parent from doing so unless they provide information sufficient for the stores to verify the age of their child. Texas families will generally have to submit government IDs—passports or birth certificates for kids under driving age—to the App Store as part of the initial setup of the device and App Store account. Without information sufficient to distinguish the age of a child under 13 or between 13 and 16, the store will not be able to set up an account for the child.
After the setup stage, parents in Texas will encounter additional problems where, in other parts of the world, the process just works. For example, ASAA requires the App Store to send download consent or rejection “flags” to developers rather than allowing app download rejections to happen at the iOS level, which is how it works everywhere else. These flags are in addition to the requirement for developers to receive age category flags. This means that parents cannot rely on their flags being honored unless the apps their child wants to download have been updated for compliance. More broadly, it means that the consistently reliable “Ask to Buy” feature, the updates to it announced at WWDC this year, and those rolled out in the future, are now uncertain for Texas families thanks to ASAA.
Likewise, by saddling all iOS developers with verification-backed flags, all apps could be required to comply with the federal Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). COPPA compliance is expensive and not designed for general audience apps—and general audience apps are not developed to adhere to COPPA. The resulting liability and compliance hangover is prohibitive, inevitably resulting in developers being less likely to provide stargazing apps and calculators for all ages and limiting users’ options in Texas. This outcome actually makes parental controls and updates like the ones announced at WWDC less effective and more confusing, as calculator apps are pushed into the 13+ category and put out of reach when parents want them on their kids’ devices.
While ASAA proponents may be tempted to point to parental control updates as a result of legislative threats, the opposite is true. ASAA actively thwarts parental controls and is serving only to threaten and undermine their evolution. When ASAA was not yet a bill (and iOS parental controls were already 10 years old) in January 2024, I wrote about the existing parental controls, explaining why it would be a bad idea to degrade them and undermine their evolution with government mandates. Unless policymakers stop its spread, ASAA might succeed in turning the thriving mobile ecosystem and its advancing parental controls into one that is static and directed by government bureaucrats rather than parents and innovators.