Brief & History Since iOS 17.4 and up we experience a lot of flakyness when it comes to DeviceActivity event thresholds. After a lot of testing and investigations inside system logs and filing countless bug reports we found a reproducible way why the event thresholds are not getting properly called. Findings Apparently when the device reaches near to max memory something called jetsamkills processes left and right. This means that the UsageTrackingAgent that (we think) is responsible for tracking the usage time of the device gets killed and doesn't recover until significant memory is freeing up on the device. How to test it yourself Use a slightly older device with ~ 3 or 4 GB of RAM Open a game or two that is meomry intensive (like Fishing Clash, yes..) and observe In the console logs you see something that only happens then: Process UsageTrackingAgent [39307] killed by jetsam reason highwater This happens often but recovers itself when the UsageTrackingAgent exceeds their 6MB memory limit. Yet the log looks like this: Process UsageTrackingAgent [39307] killed by jetsam reason per-process limit Once you kick the game, the memory is free and sometimes the event thresholds are calling in again. Defeating the purpose However this defeats the purpose of tracking usage time and shielding perhaps the playing app from being played after a certain amount of time! Feedback Assistant Ticket Here is the ticket with sysdiagnose, step by step and more information: FB13884981 Please fix this ASAP, this is such a pain for production users and their kids EVERY DAY.

I have a problem I have an iphone 12 and iOs 18 and when I go into settings and click on screen time it crashes my settings

Hey, So I obviously downloaded the dev beta the second I could, and I didn’t notice any bugs. Except after the first reboot, the new Screen Time settings UI is replaced by the old one (see video below). This also has an effect on Remote Screen Time Management somehow, making any change (Downtime, App limit, etc) from the guardian’s device over the internet (as in not directly on the managed phone) not take effect at all. Rebooting does nothing, connecting to wifi does nothing, everything. I reported this to the Feedback Assistant so hopefully they catch wind of this soon. Anyone else experiencing this bug or does anyone have a workaround? Reply if so. Thanks, Mr. Sharky

Hey, So I obviously downloaded the dev beta the second I could, and I didn’t notice any bugs. Except after the first reboot, the new Screen Time settings UI is replaced by the old one (see video below). This also has an effect on Remote Screen Time Management somehow, making any change (Downtime, App limit, etc) from the guardian’s device over the internet (as in not directly on the managed phone) not take effect at all. Rebooting does nothing, connecting to wifi does nothing, everything. I reported this to the Feedback Assistant so hopefully they catch wind of this soon. Anyone else experiencing this bug or does anyone have a workaround? Reply if so. Thanks, Mr. Sharky

With the ScreenTime API Apple talks a lot about their focus on privacy and the data not leaving the device. Does that mean there would be a problem with an app where the users ScreenTime data is shared to a custom backend? Could this potentially cause an app to be rejected from the AppStore?

Hi, I have a released screentime app ScreenZen. The last few days I've seen a disturbing spike in bug reports coming from people with 17.4.1 and 17.5.1 phones with no update to the app itself. People reported they saw the issue immediately after updating their iOS version. Unfortunately it is not replicable on all phones with those versions, so we haven't been able to replicate it on our test phones. It appears the issue is the ApplicationToken passed into ShieldActionExtension and ShieldConfigurationExtension does not match any of the ApplicationTokens that the user selected to block through FamilyControls. (The selected ApplicationTokens are being loaded through a group UserDefaults and they are indeed being loaded in the ShieldActionExtension in the bug reports).This is preventing the app from loading the correct settings and handling the blocking accordingly. I am trying to isolate this better with a new release with better logging, but would appreciate any help on this issue.

I have a couple of questions on the FamilyActivityPicker that I couldn't seem to find in the documentation: Is there any way to have it show only apps or websites? I've had some users reach out with frustrations because they want to select a category of apps (e.g. "Social"), but that also selects a lot of websites that they don't want to include. Where does the picker get the websites that it populates? It seems like there's not much rhyme or reason to these (and there's often multiple urls for the same site - e.g. facebook.com and m.facebook.com). Is there any way (as a developer) to have preset app selections available upon download? For example, can I have an option that has certain apps in the Social category chosen by default so that each user doesn't have to go in and manually select all of the apps they want?

Hello, I developed a parental control app, this app has two clients one for the child and one for the parent. I could implement screen time to retrieve the child's screen time data and show it to the child by ActivityReportExtension but I didn't find any document to implement this feature on the parent device. I mean like the Apple screen time, parents can see their children's screen time (in the settings>screen time) I need to implement ActivityReportExtension in the parent client of my app that shows the child's screen time. is it possible or this API is only restricted to Apple itself?

Hi, How to change title, subtitle, primaryButtonLabel, secondaryButtonLabel values according to iPhone language? I noticed that the Shield Configuration Extension only runs once, when I turn on shield. Currently I can't find a way to run the Shield Configuration Extension again. Thanks!

I am using the DeviceActivityMonitor eventDidReachThreshold functionality, but it became very unreliable on the iOS 17.5 beta. Anyone experiencing similar problems? Any known workarounds?

Hi there, I'm currently working with the Screen Time API using the family controls package to manage application usage on iOS devices. I want to block access to all applications except those specifically allowed by the user. While the ManagedSettingsStore.shield.applications method works for defining apps to block. However, integrating the .all(except:) from ShieldSettings.ActivityCategoryPolicy.all(except:) is unfortunately not working for me. Here is my code snippit. Can anyone help out? And if anyone has examples of similar implementations or tips on best practices for using the Screen Time API for such scenarios, please let me know! class ShieldManager: NSObject, ObservableObject, NFCNDEFReaderSessionDelegate { @Published var discouragedSelections = FamilyActivitySelection() private let store = ManagedSettingsStore() func shieldActivities() { // Clear to reset previous settings store.clearAllSettings() // This is an array with the app and category selection let applications = discouragedSelections.applicationTokens let categories = discouragedSelections.categoryTokens // //https://developer.apple.com/documentation/managedsettings/shieldsettings/activitycategorypolicy store.shield.applications = applications.isEmpty ? nil : applications store.shield.applicationCategories = categories.isEmpty ? nil : .specific(categories) store.shield.webDomainCategories = categories.isEmpty ? nil : .specific(categories) } f

I am developing a parent child control app using Screen time API and Family Control. I created two apps, one for parent and another for child. I want to see child device's activity report on parent app. This functionality works when there is only one parent/organiser. I am trying to add multiple parents to access device activity report using screen time API. I created a family group where I am the organiser (Dad), added another account as parent (Mom) and two child accounts. On the child's device I installed the app, authorised the app for parental approval (Dad) and screen time restrictions. When using the parent app as Mom, I am unable to fetch the child device's activity report.

There is an inconsistent issue when views are rendered from the Device Activity Report Extension. This issue is noticeable only on release versions and it works fine in debug mode. Around 80% of the times, the Report Views return blank screen and this is only the case when a weekly/monthly filter is used. Although, it works as expected for daily report views. My questions are: How are all the Report Activity Views working fine in debug mode but not in release mode? How the daily activity filter works fine in the release mode but the weekly/monthly filters don't work? Is this because of a memory limit issue in the extension? As of now, I have the family-controls(distribution) entitlement only for the app and for the extensions I only have family-controls(development) entitlement. Do I need to request for family-controls(Distribution) entitlement even for the extensions? I have seen threads on the forum mentioning the blank screen issue associated with the DeviceActivityReport but haven't found a solution to it. Any suggestions/feedback would be of great help, thanks.

Hi, Is there any way to force orientation = portrait when opening another shielded app? Thanks!

I've been working with the Screen Time API for almost 6 months now. I found out it's completely unreliable, testing on iOS 17.4, the DeviceActivityReport is not showing, the DeviceActivityMonitor more often than not does not fire intervalDidStart. It's very frustrating. Has anyone found out a workaround? We all know there has to be something we're doing wrong, since apps like Opal and Jono does not present those types of issues. Let's please unite our forces and find a solution. How to use this API should not be a secret!

I am currently trying to build a prototype parental control app using the ScreenTime API. I was just wondering if I needed to create a separate parent and child app?

it is possible to get app monthly activity in swift 5?

Hi, we are facing issues with the FamilyActivityPicker. I have 2 devices in the same family, one successfully authorised as child device using AuthorizationCenter.shared.requestAuthorization(for: .child), the other one is used as parent device. When I invoke FamilyActivityPicker on the children's device it works as expected but when invoked on the parent's device it only shows list of categories but not a single app. This behavior doesn't occur every time, on some devices it sometime works as it should. It's very odd and I can't find any reason why it is happening. I would appreciate any tips. Tested on app built with Xcode 15.3 an run on iOS 17.4.1 and iOS 16.7.2

I am building an app that manages ScreenTime and I would like to persist the tokens of which apps are frequently limited to CoreData locally. I attempted to do so by converting to a string but was unable to find a way to initialize an ActivityCategoryToken with a string. Is this possible? Am I going about it the wrong way? Thanks.

I have an app on App Store and some users started seeing this bug when the app requests for Screen Time API usage. The error is "The data couldn't be read because it isn't in the correct format". But it works still for most users and I can't reproduce it on my device. Checking the competitors, some of them shows this error when requesting for ScreenTime usage: "An unknown error occurred: NSCocoaErrorDomain, 4864) Has anyone experienced this? Thank you! My code below requesting screen time authorization .onAppear { Task { do { try await center.requestAuthorization(for: .individual) if center.authorizationStatus == .approved { self.checkApproved() } else { state = .denied } } catch let error { showingAlert = true errorTitle = error.localizedDescription state = .denied } } }