An 8-year-old girl managed to trick her iPhone 's Screen Time feature by exploiting a bug in the app . As Redditor Jsmith4523 posted , he noticed that his little sister was still watching YouTube videos long after the time limit their parents had set on the device had expired.
As it turned out, the little girl was watching the videos through the iMessage App Store. As his sister revealed to him, "she's been doing this for a few weeks.".
Screen Time is a feature that helps parents control the time their children can spend in apps on iPhone and iPad devices.
However, the iMessage app for some reason allows access to other apps, like YouTube, even when Screen Time is enabled. To use it, you need to:
- Open the iMessage app.
- Open a new text message.
- In the iMessage bar, find and tap iMessage App Store.
- In the search box, type YouTube and open it.
After that you can see the YouTube interface, which allows you to watch any video, despite the fact that Screen Time is enabled on iOS.
User Jsmith4523 says his sister was using an iPhone 6 running iOS 12.4.6, and he tried this hack on iPhone X running iOS 13.4.1 and it worked. Other Redditors who have also tried this hack claim that it works on everything from the first-generation iPhone SE to the current iPhone 11 Pro.
What's quite strange, of course, is the fact that the original post was later deleted by the Redditor, even though it had garnered 450+ upvotes.
We're not sure why he did this, but many have commented that he may have considered filing the bug with Apple. However, others have pointed out that in order to be eligible for the bug bounty, you have to disclose the bug to Apple before it's made public. So that could be why he deleted it. Either way, this isn't the first time a kid has managed to outsmart a major tech company. In this case, we're glad it's not a serious bug and it's easy enough for Apple to fix.
