One of the big challenges for parents these days is that you may want to give your kids access to a phone for emergencies or tracking before you are willing to give them access to the internet, social media apps, and so on. There’s also a growing trend of people buying dumb phones in order to reduce their own phone addiction, like the Nokia shown above.
Apple is giving parental controls a major upgrade in iOS 27, but there’s a little-known way to turn an iPhone into a dumb phone without waiting for this …
Wired’s Jeremy White realized he could use an accessibility feature in order to give his son an iPhone without access to web browsing and with complete control over the apps he was allowed to use – all without needing to subscribe to a third-party app.
He did it using a feature called Assistive Access. This is something I actually used myself when repurposing an old iPad into a smart home control panel for guests, though in that case I was locking it to just one app. It allows you not only to choose the apps available to a user but also to opt for large friendly tiles for those apps instead of the usual iOS interface.
White said that setting it up was extremely straightforward (sadly, he beat me to the “child’s play” phrasing I’d intended to use).
