Family Sharing Screentime not working with ios 16

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Level 1

7 points

Family Sharing Screentime not working with ios 16

I am the Family Sharing organizer (mom). I have twin teens who have been using Screentime since getting their iPhones 5-6 yrs. With the ios 16 update, SCREENTIME WILL NOT WORK! I am beyond frustrated and irritated. The only way to get it to work is to do it "manually" on their phones... I am no longer able to use Family Sharing to communicate with their iPhones. This happened when I updated to ios 16. I noticed 1 phone stopped sharing ... had both of them update their phones to ios 16. Nothing works with screentime from MY phone ...

I have done the following -

updated everyone's phones to same ios
removed all family members from Family Sharing
logged out of iCloud on ALL devices
logged back in to iCloud
turned off all screentimes
reinvited everyone to Family Sharing
made sure everyone is sharing across devices
etc, etc, etc

Any additional suggestions?? They have strict phone policies at school ... I schedule devices during the day but can't when they are not next to me (have to change on their phone). HOWEVER ... if they are on Family Sharing and I use Screentime on THEIR phones, it messes with the passcode at times and NO ONE can get in. Have to go through steps of "Forgot Password" for Screentime.

WHAT DID APPLE DO??!!! It was working just fine. Now I have teenagers with access to the world at all hours!

Thanks!

iPhone 11 Pro, iOS 16

Posted on Nov 22, 2022 08:25 AM

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Answer 1

Shannon_DN

Community Specialist

Nov 23, 2022 05:21 PM in response to lifeasnancy

Hello lifeasnancy,

Thank you for posting in Apple Support Communities.

You have gone through some great troubleshooting steps so far.

Based on your troubleshooting, we would like to share this document: Set up Screen Time for a family member on iPhone - Apple Support

If you are following the information provided there and Screen Time is still not working as expected, we would recommend reaching out to Apple Support so they can look into this in more detail. You can reach them here:

Kindest regards.

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Answer 2

lifeasnancy Author

Level 1

7 points

Dec 1, 2022 10:03 PM in response to Shannon_DN

So … I chatted with Apple support and they had zero information to give me. This is ridiculous!!

There seems to be some kind of “miscommunication” between my phone and my daughters’ phones. “Family Sharing” works … I can see their phone & iPods. However, when I turn on “Screentime” from MY phone, it doesn’t communicate with their phones … there is nothing … just a spinning wheel where activity info used to be. It’s as if there is a setting on their phones BLOCKING me from turning on Screentime. After I have set it up on my phone, I check their phones, and Screentime is not enabled… it only shows “turn on screen time” button. If I turn it on while using Screentime from MY phone, it somehow blocks the pass code and won’t let me get in even though I set the pass code!!! So maddening!!

What happened with iOS 16??!!! I would have slight glitches here in there before, but at least I had the capability of using Screentime!

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Answer 3

Jan 2, 2023 03:51 PM in response to lifeasnancy

I just wanted to share that I am having similar issues. As soon as we updated to iOS 16, screentime stopped working effectively for us. I will get requests for time but it takes forever to load the request to approve it. If it does load and we allow extra time, the approval doesn’t actual go through to their phone and sometimes we have to input our parent code directly on their phone. It also takes an extraordinarily long time to load their”screentime activity”. I’m not sure what happened with iOS 16 but Apple needs to find a bug fix ASAP. My husband is having the exact same issue so this isn’t just my phone.

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Family Sharing Screentime not working with ios 16

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