Watch screentime communication limits not working

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Level 1

6 points

Watch screentime communication limits not working

I have my sons stand-alone watch configured to allow calls and messages from contacts only but he is still getting calls from all sorts of numbers. Given that there is no way to block or report numbers on the watch or via the watch settings on my phone (the parent device) Apple needs to pull their socks up and make the communication limits robust - by that I mean they actually have to work all of the time. I would have chosen a different product like the ticktalk had I known the Apple limits were so unreliable.

Is there a fix to this problem??? All software is up to date across devices. My phone (the parent device) has iCloud contacts turned on.

Apple Watch SE

Posted on Jan 25, 2023 8:45 PM

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Answer 1

ajfz63

Level 1

12 points

Mar 6, 2023 5:32 PM in response to Zia005

Same issue!! Even with contact filtering my 8 year old daughter's apple watch gets incoming calls from people not in her contact list.

Maybe this will help you. I figured out a work around to stop the calls not on her contact list at least. Ridiculous that apple hasn't figured this all out yet.

Go to settings on the watch.
Go to Phone
Scroll to the bottom and turn off "Silence unknown callers"

Now anyone not in her contact list wont ring and she can't call them back accidentally or intentionally.

Unfortunately they still show in the call history and the blocked messages still show up as "message they cant view" in the imessages app.

Also - I realized that if someone texts her not in the contact list, it comes up as a notification and they can see the text and even respond right from the notification preview. UNACCEPTABLE they would allow this. I went to notifications and turned off imessage notifications completely and that fixes it for now but unfortunately someone could just turn it back on.

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