I have a bit of a problem with screen time on my MacBook.
I have used screen time on my iPhone for quite a while now, and I mainly use it to limit the usage of my own device. I set up downtime to basically lock down almost everything on my iPhone between 22:00 and 08:30 the next morning.
Because I am weak, I have set my screen time passcode to a random passcode, which I promptly forgot, to make it harder for me to change the settings.
As I am eager to try out new functions of Mac OS, I just updated my MacBook to the Catalina Golden Master.
What I did not know was that Catalina enables screen time sharing as soon as you login to iCloud with your account. So now, after 22:00, my Mac will basically shut down any apps that are not whitelisted (Which is basically any app that has been downloaded through the App store.)
This is a problem, as I use my MacBook for work, and I often use it between those times, I also have a lot of iCloud functionality synced, so I do not really want to unlinke iCloud.
Now in the past, I have used encrypted backups combined with pinfinder
to recover the passcode, but with iOS 13 it seems that the passcode is stored in the cloud. And (Murphy’s law in action), I do not have any iOS 12 backups with this specific passcode.
Is there any other way to recover the passcode, or override screen time settings from the terminal?
I am very aware this is exactly why you don’t use beta software on your main machine, and I should have checked before updating willy-nilly, but what can I say, I’m an idiot.
But the reality is that, while I have learned from my mistake, my machine is now hardly usable, and I don’t want to go through the hassle of downgrading either my Mac or my iPhone. (Also, when Catalina releases, I’ll still run into the same problem, because I think screen time sharing is turned on automatically)
