Jamf Parent 4+

This app has helped us a lot.

We had approached the school with concerns about the amount of gaming time our 12 year old was using in between his school work, before and after school. The only way we had of managing it was to remove the device from his possession, which led to no end of trouble from him. The school told us about the app. We have been using the it for two weeks now and it has transformed our family in that time, hence my 4 star rating.

I do find that it needs a lot of manual input to keep the permissions to where you need them at any one time period.

I have got a bit confused with it, as safari and mail did not seem to be available and I couldn’t understand why when I was ticking it to be available. I stumbled across another page (restrict app functionality) within the app that had safari and mail disabled, and once released, the apps became available on my son’s iPad.

It turns out there are three ways of enabling/disabling apps, but if you disable an app or category on one page, when you go into the page where you allow access to apps, the disabled apps appear on the page seemingly available. If access to an app is disabled elsewhere in the app, surely it would make sense for it NOT to show up on the list of apps to enable. It’s the same as giving him permission to access some games, we realised by trial and error that both the ‘games’ and ‘entertainment’ categories needed to be enabled before the games were accessible.

I am willing to allow my son access to certain games during the school day, to do this I have to allow access to ‘games’ and ‘entertainment’ categories. I then go to the ‘enable app lock’ page, and give him permission to access selected apps during the school day. Once this timer is finished, it reverts back to allowing him access to all games, unless we manually reset the permissions to remove the game access. It would REALLY help us if we could set it up in advance so that his game access is locked off at a set time, like his PS4 where we can set the times of day the game is available as well as the maximum time he is allowed to spend on it.

I would like to suggest another improvement, if the enable app lock is set up with the timer and you need to go back into that page to make and changes, sometimes the whole page resets itself. It forces you to go through the whole list from scratch, including resetting the timer, which defaults back to 30minutes as soon as the page is opened. This is something I had to do multiple times yesterday and has been a tedious process. Is this an unintended issue? If so, it needs fixing.

Overall I think this app is amazing, it has seriously transformed our family life in just two weeks, but it needs some elements working on to make it more ‘parent friendly’. Keep up the good work 👍 We, as parents, need all the help we can get to manage online time, especially at the moment!