That's how my children's iPads are too. Permanent downtime, with a few always allowed apps, and the rest on demand. And indeed, the most frustrating part is when my daughter needs to do some research for school. I'd have to allow each and every website she visits, so I temporarily un-downtime her phone instead...
Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click). That's why I had to opt for permanent downtime.
Yeah it's usually trouble once a week. I recently needed to pay for parking using a QR code had to finish it in the 1 minute I had. Another appointment asked me to fill some online form and their reaction when I said "my phone is blocked from the internet" was funny. Turns out they still have paper forms when needed.
> time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click).
Huh, that's weird. Seems to work ok for mine in limiting their iPad use. They can request more time and I can decide to grant it or not, I get choices of 15 minutes, 1 hour or all day.
Agreed. Another issue I have is that the requests will randomly stop propagating from the kids' iPads to my phone. To fix it, I have to either reboot the phone or if that doesn't work, change the name of my phone.
Edited to add: for some reason, time limits never worked for my kids (they could always override them with one click). That's why I had to opt for permanent downtime.