I discovered and tried to use this feature to turn an older iPhone into a dumb phone for myself, but hit several blockers
1. It’s incredibly slow to transition in and out of the mode, as mentioned in the article, which made setting it up (constant tweaks) very painful
2. For messages and calls, you were limited to select contacts only. So I couldn’t just text/call a number when I needed to.
I just tested #2 on iOS 27 Developer Beta, and this has been resolved. You can select “anyone” instead of specific contacts.
#2 seems like a feature, not a bug. I certainly don't want my 11 year old texting/calling unapproved numbers, way too young for that.
Definitely a feature, but also ruins it for this person's use case
The kids going to be driving a car in 3 years...
now that it has received attention, Apple might just throw another engineer at it :)
Eh I’ve filed a few bugs a few years ago and they seem to have been ignored. I tried it for a while and it crashed my phone frequently. My gut says it’s a hack, hence the performance issues.