When I first set the phone up, I was worried I was missing something, that this solution could not be as good as it appeared. So I took the iPhone into an Apple Store and showed it to a support staffer. “What have you done?” he said, looking incredulously at my son's iPhone with its six dumb tiles. “This is a much better solution than Screen Time. I'm going to have to tell my colleagues about this.” I told him it was Assistive Access. “We don't get trained on that,” he admitted. “But this is great.”
Yes, it's odd that Apple doesn't train all its store staff on this laudable feature, but it's baffling that it doesn't shout about how good Assistive Access is for making a kid's dumb phone. I asked Apple directly why it doesn't market this buried feature in this way. Has it ever considered making a version of Assistive Access for children, a kids' OS, in effect? While Apple helped me with all my technical queries for this piece, it declined to answer these questions.
It's more than a little interesting that the coming revamped Screen Time dropping in iOS 27 this September adopts some of the key benefits of Assistive Access, in particular the ability, for the first time, to remove access to Safari when setting up a child's profile.
So, what's the downside? Well, Assistive Access runs sluggish, but my kid was so excited to get a phone, he didn't care one bit. Initially, Assistive Access did not recognize Screen Time limits and would completely override them, however since iOS26 dropped in 2025 Apple has tweaked the mode so thankfully it does now link with screen limits that have been set up. Voicemail, however, is disabled in Assistive Access, meaning parents will have to rely on texts if a child doesn't answer a call. You also cannot turn off an iPhone in Assistive Access mode; you have to revert it to normal iOS to do this.
Perhaps more worryingly, on one occasion, my son managed to freeze the Messages app in Assistive Access mode by trying to search through loads of emojis. I was even able to repeat this freezing when he showed me what he did. The only way to unfreeze Messages was to take it out of Assistive Access mode, then put it back in—something he cannot do on his own. He was able to use the other five apps just fine when Messages fell over, though.
So far, there have been no other issues, apart from worrying my son will now lose an expensive iPhone—but at least we’ll be able to track it, just as we did when he left it at school the other day.