This past week has been frustrating dealing with the update to Microsoft Family Safety.
- After the update, the Android app indicates I need to update it, but it doesn’t have an update in the Google Play Store. I have effectively been locked out of the app on my phone.
- I used to be able to specify time for Xbox & PC to be shared, I no longer can.
- In the past couple of weeks, when granting more time to the kids, I have seen the accounting of time fail, where the kids no longer have a limit.
The latest update then ‘provided’ the option of splitting the time between Xbox and PC or using defaults. So, instead of getting all my settings stomped, I chose split. So now I have to reallocate the time back to PC as the kids rarely play Xbox.
Furthermore, I have to go through and run Windows Update on their machines for the system to recognize all these changes. Normally, this would be fine. Unfortunately, the latest update throws an error that requires me to go and shrink volumes to resize the Windows Recovery partition with an additional 250 MB. Furthermore, on one of the kid’s machines, I had to turn off hibernate, pagefile, and system protection to resize the primary volume, then turn them all back on.
The Windows Update experience was atrocious, inaccessible to many non-technical people, and represented a potentially large security vulnerability for anyone who could not do it themselves or get someone else to help them. Who is liable for that? Microsoft?
I also think this splitting of Windows and Xbox is fundamentally dumb. My ex and I have to manage the Family Safety feature jointly since the kids’ accounts cannot be part of two families, however, we cannot differentiate machines between our two houses with different times and schedules.
Family Safety ought to have a way to categorize devices into tiered groups. My home, my ex’s home, then devices with shared time split amongst them, and devices that track independently. Give me a choice and means of categorizing and splitting time how I need to.
I’m really disappointed there is this big update to a system that increases problems for me instead of giving me better tools to manage time and devices for the kids.
Well said.
They’ve taken a remarkably average product and made it completely useless.
I used to use the XBOX Family app to control screen time on my kids PCs and Xbox. Now it only works for Xbox, and the Microsoft Family app is 100% useless, as you say.
The web interface for Microsoft Family Safety is clunky and doesn’t show anything useful, and when it gives you a notification, it’s usually half to many hours after the request by the child! You can’t preemptively add time.
Clearly nobody at Microsoft is reading the app reviews, because they just tell everybody to send logs from the app… Which it won’t let you.
Non-technical parents will be super frustrated and confused.
Hi ANW,
Yes, I also encountered an issue that if I granted more time after the time limit is used for a child, sometimes it would ignore the limit for the new time granted.
I sent them a comprehensive email with issues I have encountered. I don’t know if anything interesting will come of it.
Cheers,
Brent