So you are interested in introducing your baby to the iPad. Where do we start?
First of all, if you are sharing your iPad with your baby, you need to first protect the apps that are important to you, such as your emails or anything work-related. The parental control on Apple’s mobile devices’ is a feature called “Restrictions”. To be honest, this feature does not impress me, but it does have some goods to it, such as disabling the ability to delete apps and to make in-app purchases. To understand “Restrictions” and learn how to set it up, check out Apple’s instruction.
There are a few reasons why “Restrictions” is not 100% practical. The feature only offers protection for limited apps that came with the iPad, such as iTune, Safari, and Camera. I have an Chrome (my preferred browser over Safari) installed on my iPad, and it is not available to be turned off when I want to enable “Restrictions”. So, if I disable Safari via “Restrictions”, my baby can still use Chrome to get on the Internet; if I disable YouTube, my baby can still use Netflix. Regardless, the feature is not entirely useless. As mentioned earlier, it can prevent your baby from deleting apps or making in-apps purchases.
“Restrictions” is also highly inconvenient. Everytime you want to enable “Restrictions”, you have to go through the entire setup, from setting up PIN to turning off “Allow” apps. It lacks the ability to remember the previous configuration, and you will always need to spend a few minutes setting up “Restrictions” before handing the iPad off to your baby. I will be more incline to use the feature if I can save a setup that I can quickly retrieve and re-activate.
If you have a habit of organizing apps into folders, you will not be pleased with “Restrictions”. After enabling and disabling the feature, you will lose your folder-apps placement. Another words, apps that are stored in folders prior to using “Restrictions” will not be returned to the original folders afterward. For instance, I like to keep my App Store icon inside a folder called Shopping. Whenever I have “Restrictions” enabled to disallow in-apps purchases, the App Store icon would also be disappeared to forbid direct access. When I have “Restrictions” disabled afterward, my App Store icon would return to my main dashboard instead of going back to the Shopping folder. I would appreciate if the system could return the hidden app icons back to their original file locations.
With the limited parental control options out there, “Restrictions” may serve the purpose with some inconvenience. Nonetheless, I am experimenting with an alternative approach in iPad protection. I will share my method and the result in my next post.
