By far the best thing is that he makes his own playdates. I'm not the middleman anymore. He just makes plans and asks me if it's ok. And if his friend doesn't have a landline, I let him call their parent. It surprises them, but when he leaves a message, they love it. He's definitely had more time with friends because of it.
Another funny thing was he complained about writing a thank you note, so we said "OK, the alternative is that you have to call them". He called them, had a nice conversation, and thanked them. Honestly, it was better than a thank you note.
It's been one of the best purchases we're made. I feel some hope this will delay the eventual begging for a smart phone because he's able to do the most critical thing, connect with friends.
I recently got divorced, so there is a phone at each house in case they want to reach out to the other parent directly. Ex and I did not want the kids to feel their right to reach the other parent needed to ask for permission
Family has Softphone in their mobiles, so the full family is a speed dial away.
I also whitelist numbers they can dial out.
So far it’s working like a charm, they love it.
The thing for me that has really unlocked voice-based socializing has been the 12 year old jumping on Discord with his buddies from school. I feel like this mirrors well how I myself chat with my adult male friends—it's rarely in the context of just "a call" but rather while doing another activity. So when I see him joking around with them while they play Minecraft or whatever, that feels like it's a reasonable pattern for how to sustain friendships.
For my situation, telling my mom her voip phone was a landline would be problematic.
I do need some solution though, AT&T technicians tell me copper thieves are disrupting her service regularly.
They need only an electrical outlet for the charge stand.
e.g. corded phone -> cordless phone -> mobile phone -> smartphone
or
records -> tape -> CD -> MP3 -> cloud
or
Atari -> NES -> SNES -> N64 -> Gamecube -> Wii -> Switch 2
If I build it, I can control the full feature set and explain to him how it worked and he'll get the 'cool' factor too. With the raspberry pi I have lying around at home, it doesn't sound impossible!
- allowed list of apps, can reduce it to just phone, imessage, and utilities like weather app
- effectively permanent downtime, just set the end time less than start time such as 3:00 am to 2:59 am (technically 1 minute of non downtime). This blocks apps except for the allowed apps
- disable installing apps from app store
- disable adding new contacts and block calls and messages not in contact list. This allows parent to control who the phone can be used to contact
- none of these settings can be changed without the screen time pin
- also configure the phone with a minor apple account and add to your family group so you can monitor and control screen time settings from your phone.
So start with a super locked down phone that can only be used to communicate with parents. This is very helpful when they start after school sports. And the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it.
Later when they're older start allowing communication with friends from school. But still only phone and imessage, no other apps. This reinforces that it's a communication device, not for endless scrolling and watching videos.
This type of solution provides a simple system that requires very little administration and supervision. The problem with modern communications tech as it relates to children is that by default these systems provide access to every adult on planet earth to your child's inbox. That is not a feature that I need, but rather is a crippling design flaw much more likely to harm my kids than it is to help them.
What's going to happen immediately is that kids with equivalent phones will compare, realize that one has a lot of restrictions and the other doesn't, and it becomes a nightmare. They know that all you need to do is unlock it for them.
It's the same mental distinction between "For $200 we'll install rear seat warmers in your Tesla" and "For $200 we'll 'unlock' the already-present rear seat warmers" (that's the only hardware unlock I've ever paid for and I'm still bitter 7 years later).
Don't you think they will as easily realize their newly purchased TinCan is far more restricted than the 10 year old phone theirs friends received from their parents/siblings?
https://www.unihertz.com/fr-fr/products/jelly-star
- Because it's small, it doesn't look like a regular smartphone
- The small size would make it impractical for social media/scrolling/videos even if I were to unlock it
...but compared to a dumbphone, I can still allow Spotify and their school management software so they can access their schedule and homework
Instead of being bitter for 7 years perhaps you should not have purchased such an absurd thing.
Also Screen Time is a little better in a few ways than what Android offers, but it’s still a joke, is incredibly Byzantine, and limits your options as a parent.
1. The admin work of parental controls in Apple is non-trivial and obscure. I would guess there are something like 300 different knobs and settings you can control for each kid individually. The UX is terrible and there are features missing that seem extremely basic and fundamental. For example, I can't see how much time left my kids currently have, nor can I block any app "now".
2. "the phone is so locked down they don't really have any interest in it." This has not been my experience at all. My kids know that less-locked-down devices exist and frequently complain about the restrictions.
Configuring them from scratch is a minimum 20 minute job, and then you need to double and triple check to avoid mistakes. More like a half hour.
I'm glad we ditched iPads, it sucked.
Drug dealer getting the kids hooked early is priority #1.
Give just enough "parental control" to lure parents in.
Make it just annoying enough that the parents eventually give up and the kid is the one pushing the drug the entire time.
With a device that's not a smartphone, you don't have this problem.
I don't know the extent to which such devices are still manufactured today.
(and it's not the only one, also check KaiOS phones)
About a dozen times in those years, the system silently failed open either completely or partially (eg. some restrictions still applied, but whitelists in Safari were no longer enforced, the app store was suddenly accessible again or time limits were no longer in place). Not once was there any indication on the parent device.
Several times, the only way to reenable broken restrictions was to wipe the device, because changes to parental controls simply stopped syncing.
Here's long-time Mac developer and blogger Michael Tsai describing the same thing: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/09/24/screen-time-brokenness/
I have a device setup like this but I hate it, it’s possibly the worst UX I’ve used from Apple.
Of all the Apple software piss-off's I've had over the last few years, I feel that Screen Time is a broken mess. So many things don't work, require newer versions of iOS than the device supports, etc.
I've used it for years on my sons devices and it's a constant hassle.
I read the previous discussion, oof:
S04dKHzrKT wrote
Make note of the privacy policy[1]. Some users may not like the data they collect. > Information Collected from Children: As detailed in Section 3.C, we collect voice audio during calls, call log information, and utilize the Parent-provided contact list in relation to the Child's use of the Tin Can Device. We may also collect device identifiers and technical usage data related to the Service.
>Call Logs: We collect information about calls made using Phones, including the phone numbers you call or receive calls from, the date/time of the calls, and the length of the calls. We also collect network quality metrics and other technical data related to call performance. Please note that we do not record calls.
The version of the privacy policy cited in the previous discussion cited that voice audio is collected for the purposes of forwarding it to the other phone.
Their policy says that the information they collect is used to "Send you marketing communications (see the section below for information about how to opt out of these communications at any time)" and to "Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities in connection with our Phones and Services, including to generate de-identified, anonymized, or aggregated data" and to "Target advertisements to you on third-party platforms and websites (for more information and to opt out, see the Targeted Advertising and Analytics section below)"
Remember that "de-identified" and "anonymized" is a lie. De-identified data can be re-identified, and anonymized data can be de-anonymized. Often trivially. There are even situations where individuals can be identified from aggregated data.
It's getting more and more normal that sites won't link out of their own "property".
Obvious benefits include low cost, full interop with all other phones, and having the kids learn our phone numbers by heart after punching them many times.
voip.ms is about $1.30/mo with the cost of the phone number (DID) and "minutes".
I have some more breadcrumbs on this thread if you are interested in details on my setup too.
[1] https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3328227/move-o...
That sounds absolutely horrible.
It's especially fun to watch them discover the very concept of a landline: the keypad (they thought it was a pin code); the dial tone; the memorizing and writing down of phone numbers.
5/5 highly recommended.
Big yikes.
I would rather just have an old iPad and trust my child to use it responsibly.
Overall I think that while the Zoomers are doomed, because they grew up in the height of social media frenzy, generation alpha put two and two together and collectively noticed that screen time = no attention from parents. Some are okay with that, but others, like my kid prefer having attention above all.
Nice to safe the kids from that... But who will save the adults? ^^
Yes, social media is bad for kids. You start to realize that. It only took 15 years. The thing is: It's equally bad for you...
And you prove that every minute. Whenever you say something, and after three sentences, basically every topic ends up in something related to Instatoktube.
My only hope is that what we are currently see rising is similar to what happened to alcoholism and chain smoking.
Just like alcohol and tobacco, it's bad for adults but way worse for kids.
Is it the game changer we thought it would be? No. We thought my daughter would want to call her friends as much as she wants us to call their friends' parents to have them come over. We thought my son would use it as much as he texts on his gizmo.
Having said this, they are getting experience, albeit infrequent, with saying "Hello.... I love you. Goodbye."
And, yeah, when it rings, there is a mad-dash to pick it up. There is something uniquely pre cell phone ("reminds me of the 80s") about the joy and wonder of "Who could be calling me (at this hour)?"
It’s so fun watching them talk to their buddies from school, planning play dates, just chitchatting etc. My favorite thing is when they prank call one another, cracks me up.
Maybe the novelty wears off soon but for at least the last month or so they’ve used it every day. It feels like it gives them a bit of autonomy they’re seeking right now at their ages, but in a relatively safe way.
Highly recommend it.
I first found the Tin Can cool, but now seeing their privacy policy, it's definitely nothing for me. I'd just use a normal VoIP cordless phone (e.g. Gigaset makes various models), or even a normal corded phone with a VoIP ATA. Some of them might even have integrated whitelisting, but I didn't check.
I have an Ooma phone now and I just plugged my existing phones into the Ooma box which then works the same as an old landline for the most part.
I'm an older Gen-X and I've stopped doing this unless I recognize the caller. I'm not going to give a scammer anything to build a voice print on. I also use the stock greeting for voicemail instead of a personal one.
The number of calls I get where it's either dead silence in the other end or clearly a call center based on the noise can only be categorized as "too much".
The number was on a spam list, but somehow managed to leave a "message".
The most surprising thing is that it was obviously a person calling and not a bot, as I was hearing the rustle of something (mouse?) being moved over a desk.
Slightly rude, but saying nothing at all is just bizarre to me.
Edit to add: One thing I've done for the last decade or so is use a number from an area code I don't live in. Most of my spam calls come from the same area code, so if I see that I know it's spam or a wrong number.
It doesn't share my voice (for fingerprinting, demographic leak, etc, smh).
Also works as a bot filter - Humans tend to start with a "hello..?" because they're not sure anyone is there, while robots use the non-zero audio as a signal to start talking with full confidence.
I don’t get that. How is answering the phone mentally accepting the caller? What does it even mean to mentally accept? Is it that you don’t want to talk? Then let it go to voicemail and decide if you want to call back or not? I think I’m missing the point.
related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
I based it on the instructions provided by this Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39801991
Shameless plug: I started my own service without vendor hardware lock in.
I am curious: have you gone down the tr069 rabbit hole? If not how do you plan to do endpoint management?
Are you using a Fanvil H2W? Too? That was my first phone choice.
I also learned of https://www.beanstalk.club from this thread as well. Looks like there are a few folks trying to do similar services without the proprietary hardware and waitlists.
For the service I am building (havenphone.com) I used Grandstream HT801 with success with voip.ms. I don't love how easy their cloud can take over the device though.
We have also told the kids we are not 24/7 actively monitoring them, because we woud like to trust them. Unless we think there's an issue they cannot, will not or are forced not to tell us, we will not intervene with their phone usually. They know we can track their phones anywhere on this planet and they don't care, because we are not acting as helicopter parents.
This has built trust between our kids and us parents. It forces us as parents to start trusting the kids and the kids get the freedom they want and need.
Is it 100% perfect? No, not by a long shot. It's a balance that may be scary for parents. We talk with them about stuff like doomscrolling, social media drama and privacy. They show us memes, tell us about their school life and usually do not care if we happen to see some private conversation on the corner of our eye.
Do the kids make mistakes? You bet. That's part of their life. Do we as parents make mistakes? Absolutely. None of the kids came with a manual. :)
If you're going to get this product, make sure you pay attention when you set it up, and opt out if you are privacy minded.
Voilà, telephone service as it used to be. No proprietary payphone with questionable ToS and privacy policies needed.
Also, does this not require a landline number?
You can waitlist at https://havenphone.com if you are interested.
There were three major things I wanted to do differently from Tin Can:
- I wanted to use off the shelf VOIP hardware so if the company ever went out of business I (and any of my users) had an escape valve or could just sell the hardware.
- I wanted to have a code base I could open source. (not open source, yet!)
- I wanted flexibility to offer ATAs (devices that let you connect any ol' "analog" phone)- some of my parent friends wanted cordless "DACT" phones, interestingly.
It has been quite an adventure entering the world of VOIP.
The SIP protocol has so many esoteric options (understandably given its history!) it could make TLS look simple.
My most recent learning is this crazy protocol called TR-069 that ISPs use to configure endpoint hardware like home routers, cable modems, and VOIP phones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TR-069
Also, interestingly every cheap (sub-$50) phone and ATA I have tried has a built-in OpenVPN clients.
Oh, and one more interesting thing Grandstream ATAs are able to be taken over by the Grandstream cloud service by just providing the ATA serial number and mac address on the back of the device- I did not love that workflow when considering long-term security. (:
If you have $50 and some time to kill you can do it all yourself right now. In voip.ms you can use the phone book and the caller id filter to create a "*" hang-up rule and an "allow phone book" rule.
- https://major.io/p/85-cents-home-phone/
- https://www.voipsupply.com/fanvil-h3w-wifi-hotel-ip-phone-wh...
- https://www.voipsupply.com/fanvil-h2u-black-hotel-phone-v2
https://youtu.be/UhVi3smmvTs?si=ow6zw_xTKo22WpLZ
People can call each other but also businesses have 4-digit phone numbers that are shortened versions of the business name, like GUIT for the guitar shop.
https://telehamster.net/node/7
I hope these guys do well or more local options keep on popping up.
If you run an asterisk server on your own box, you could easily set up a private SIP network just for you and your kids, or your kids and their friends, etc. and either run a SIP client on your mobile for your use and a VOIP SIP gateway if you want your kid to be able to call a friend's mobile.
EDIT: I just looked and the PAP2T has been discontinued, but there seem to be lots of units available new from China that look identical and are sold as Linksys PAP2T, and some unbranded units that look the same but with blank labels. I've no idea if these are fully compatible with the real PAP2T, but they might still be worth trying.
[1]: https://www.grandstream.com/products/gateways-and-atas/analo...
1. dumb phone with fixed dial contacts
2. properly set smartphone which can be used as dumb phone with restricted contacts and no app install allowed, apps screen time limited to zero or heck even browser disabled in guest profile
3. kids smartwatch with parental controls which limit who they can call and who can call and message them, I'm just working on one of these and it's great even for seniors
If you don't like kid having wearable with them I have shocking news for you - you can leave all of the above at home!
Btw. kids nowadays don't really call each other, they text (IM) each other. And for the record I am one of those few parents who didn't give phone/tablet to their toddlers hands like majority of people do wheever they are (public transport, car, waiting room, etc.), my older elementary school kid has "dumb" phone (my old Symbian Nokia, but he use it only for calls/SMS anyway, though I will probably switch to restricted smartphone since it's inconvenient even for me not being able to send whatsapp message, battery is crap and classmates have whatsapp as well), my younger elementary school kid doesn't have anything, but when she goes outside alone she takes Motorola walkie talkie with roughly 0.5-1km range in city.
edit: related call scene from Fight Club how Tyler properly answers the phone (not answering but calling back and his first response is "Who is this?"):
For instance my boss couldn't call me while I'm out and about. What you expect me to carry my landline with me?
So you have to pay a monthly subscription for this, in addition to $75 for each phone, if you want to talk with anyone outside of their walled garden?
Makes sense to me. Ideally, people outside of my friends and family would not be able to call me on my regular phone either.
When I was a boy, there was no such word "playdate". What I'd do is just walk or ride my bike to a friend's house and knock on the door.
No parents involved.
The toughest part was figuring out which set of wires (my house had like 5 lines somehow) went to that particular jack in the kitchen.
(My family moved to cell phones so I got the opportunity to disassemble the old phone.)
Maybe just find some washers and glue them inside your handset and receiver?
The tactility is incredible, and it's so just so cute to watch them chat away (5 year olds!)
I guess that was my "tin can".
However, a new severely under-powered phone with no graphics or apps would probably meet the requirements of not being sucked into the grown-up world too early, and the kids can maintain their own contact lists.
And they'll grow super-fast thumbs like we had to in order to text :)
They cost about $50 but are still 4G.
That is the thing me (and most parent friends) want: freedom from spam calls and potential strangers.
Each of the kids has a really old cisco voip phone (I got 8 for £35).
There is a quick dial menu which connects too the loft, kid1, kid2, shed, living room. I also have an extension for my mobile.
That works for keeping everyone in touch and save a lot of "WHAT DID YOU SAY?".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OADXNGnJok
I don't live in the US but my child, who is 9, does not have a cell phone nor does any of his school mates. They "chat" when they see each other in school, or when they hang out together to play after school.
I wrote an app that some friends use right now. So, always interested to hear what people cobbled together!
Surely someone can build a more privacy-friendly decentralized solution?
It doesn't take much for Tin Can to start charging $50 / month for a subscription.
A 3d printed case, a little SoC, perhaps a Raspberry Pi Zero, as the brains with asterisk and some additional open source software providing a web interface running on it.
That's entirely pragmatic in this data collecting age. Being silent and hanging up as soon as you hear the spam won't get you marked as a phone line that has a human on the other end nor do you risk your voice being recorded. If you're silly enough to say your name when answering you'll just end up with text and email that is now personalised with your name (it's much faster to identify and hang up when their best intro is to say "hello who am i speaking to?" on a single person line click).
I don't know anyone in my age bracket (45) who doesn't do this let alone those younger. It's entirely understood and expected. Fuck anyone who says it's rude and those of an age particularly prone to falling for scams (70+ and 15under) should be encouraged to do this. You should be telling your kids "never say anything on picking up, let the caller to your phone identify themselves! They could be scammers trying to get your details such as your name".
I feel all these "OMG the kids don't say hello anymore they have no etiquette!!!" statements are either from the clueless or from spammers frustrated that it's much harder to get through if you don't know their name.
How does saying "hello" give scammers your details such as your name?
Pragmatically, even basic words from your voice can be used to estimate your age, gender, and geographic region (local accents).
But also read other comments, people are saying they answer their phone by stating their name, so plenty clearly use it as a greeting.
Not sure what system they're using, or why there's that characteristic BLOOP.
Even if I am expecting a call from a service provider, insurance, bank, whatever…
They’ll want you to identify yourself, name, dob, address.
Never do this to unverified inbound callers.
And how do you verify an inbound caller is who thru claim they are and not a scammer?
You don’t. You tell them you never give out PII to inbound callers as they are indistinguishable from scammers.
Then call the them on their publicly listed number and deal with the issue from there.
We need to encourage service providers to stop doing that as it is exactly leads to people being more easily scammed.
Before the smartphone did all this, no one would have come out and campaigned to build a new kind of free library outside every middle school where all these things were advertised and made readily available to kids anonymously. We do have real libraries, but they don’t just automatically accept and push books donated by any random company, foreign country, or random pervert. Because that’s an insane thing to do.
The burden should have been on the “smartphones are good” people to prove that giving kids all that was worth the downsides, or to have shown how any supposed benefits could be had more safely, without requiring all parents to become experienced MDM admins, which they just won’t do.
You sound exactly like the people who were freaking out about comic books and video games. Moral panic, forever repeating.
It is actually amazing how far with a couple of tin cans, greaseproof paper taped around one end, and string attached to the paper. You are not going to do VOIP, but 50 yards is possible.
Even more OT:
One Xmas my Dad (unredeemable gadget freak, early adopter of the TRS80) gave me and my little bro two wired handsets with batteries and a ringer. We wired up brother's bedroom to living room, but soon realised our horrible mistake:
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
[ring, ring]
"Can I have a glass of water?"
It lasted less than a day.
We also had a similar setup that did morse code, that was much less intrusive, not least because me and my little bro did not know morse, except for SOS.
Our list of experiments included: Written signs Tin cans Morse code circuit Wired handset Walkie-talkies
The fun lasted a couple years until puberty struck.
But I dunno. Kids being what they are, seem to be developing curiosity about "retro tech". So maybe there's some sort of whiplash effect occurring among them.
1. Allowing the kids to call parents and no one else, without all the extra baggage that comes with a smartphone.
2. Multiple families getting together and deciding this is how their kids will communicate with each other (i.e. all agreeing not to get smartphones for their kids).
> But if I were 11-13yo and I got this when all my friends got an iPhone? I'd be furious.
If you've decided they're not getting a smartphone at that age, they'll be furious regardless. They may opt for this as an alternative. Up to the kids.
This being Australia, likely a particular remote boarding school in a particular hot part of the county.
Come back when you’ve learned how to be reasonable sort of person.
- take a phone, remove features, package with bright colors, profit (or VC then profit, maybe).
Sadly a lot of those aren't recycling old gadgets, they are just making new ones and block features, lock down in their own "store", etc. I think it's actually quite terrible.
Although the idea is lovely, I'm not going to encourage my kiddo to chat with his buddies on a service that can hoover up their imagination for later manipulation.
I don’t see why these would ever need to be more than a pay once product.