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I think you mean “since release”.

Hasn’t it always had horrible problems? I’ve never heard a good thing about it in use.

I used it from iOS 15-18 and it always worked great. We try to limit our kids' iPad use to drawing in Freeform and the occasional edutainment app, and I never had issues with them escaping Guided Access or it causing lockups. The fact that I can barely trust it to work properly on iPadOS 26 is a huge disappointment for me.

I’ve never used it myself (no kids) but I’ve long heard tales of kids being able to get around it, it miscounting time used allowing too much use, etc.

It sounds really nice for the intended purpose, just not reliable for many.

It’s just getting worse with each new iOS release. For example before iOS 18, screen time requests from kids would come as notifications, now they are coming in as iMessages, polluting history of your actual conversations, so you can’t have functional group chat with your kid & parents.

Now in iOS 26 they messed up calculation of how much screen time is spent, so an app can have limit of 3hrs/day and still lock up after just first 9 minutes of screen time spent in that app in a day.

It seems like they have zero QA.

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