Help me think thru how to set up ipad for nephew, remote iOS support..

July 21, 2019 10:35 AM

So i don't know why i didn't think to ask ya'll for help with this before! I am setting up an ipad for my 7 year old nephew... the plot thickens below, BIG thanks in advance .. for some reason I am just a bit paralyzed by this task right now. The main goal of this ipad is for it to do one thing: run a piano learning app called Piano Maestro but this Question is more to do with iOS than that specifically.. details below

..(seriously amazing app though, by the way -- the company - JoyTunes - makes one aimed at adults too that is just.. very very well designed and gamified in motivated me a lot)

Anyway - right here are the details:

** ipad will primarily be running Piano Maestro. I have purchased a teachers account so I can put his ipad on a student account (comes with monthly teacher's fee.)

** ipad will also be running ios 9, which last I checked is still supported by Piano maestro. fingers crossed they keep that up.

** i need a way to access the ipad remotely, because nephew is far away half the year and his parents are not very tech savvy. I was going to go with Team Viewer which I use regularly. However now teamviewer requires ios 10 or later. : | on my own apple account i may access to older versions (the way you can download the most recent compatible version if you've downloaded it before) but this ties into my CORE DILEMMA which follows -

** I'm leaning towards creating a whole separate apple account for this kid's ipad for these reasons:

1) bc I really don't like the way, in recent times, i have observed various weird synching anomalies when it comes to my own multiple iOS devices registered under my apple account.

2) piano maestro expects the teacher to have one "managerial" apple account associated account, and the "students' " - in this case my nephew, and some friends who want to try it on their own - to have their own , different, apple accounts.

3) I want to put the ipad mini on a verizon prepaid plan for him, so he has a little data away from home - and I think it will be tidier for those purposes to have it be a separate apple account from mine as well.


however with a separate ios account for his ipad, i will not have access to the older version of team viewer. To be honest i'm not even entirely sure if the trick of "downloading an older version" would be 100% guaranteed to work even if the thing was on my apple account...


** as a random probably unrelated aside, i will be hiding most of the other apps on the ipad, because he already has too much screen time and so the goal here is just to use it for unitasking : piano practice


So ... um, any thoughts/tips for me?

* Do you have any tips for a remote support iOS app (would consider paid) besides teamviewer that works on older versions of iOS that is trustworthy?

* Are there some special family ways of managing apple accounts/ ios accounts that I don't know about (beyond parental controls, i mean, managing the devices in a multi device household)?

* ipad mini 3rd gen owners.. do any of you use verizon prepaid data plans on your device? or only contract? verizon employees have so far been unclear on this as well but of course, i will keep trying to ask them ..

* Are there some issues i'm not thinking about here that will bite me later that you know about ?

THANK YOU so so so so much in advance for any insight

I have grown so irritated at apple in recent years and resentful about spending time on troubleshooting issues that didn't used to come up as often with apple products that I think I have a bit of a block about how to proceed. But.. gah.. iOS. * hangs head a bit *

PS - no this app doesn't run on android. And no, I'm not interested in any other piano-learnin apps, just this one.

posted by elgee to Technology (3 answers total)

It's 2019. We're on iOS 12. Why do you want to stay on 4-year-old iOS 9? Among other things, current versions of iOS directly support controlling Screen Time and which apps can be used when.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:16 AM on July 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Anyway, to answer your question I’d at least try to set the kid up on their own account. You can manage it with Family Sharing.

If that doesn’t work you can try again, sharing your login.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:36 AM on July 21, 2019 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: That's a reasonable thought, but : I have done a lot of background research regarding the piano app, and on this generation ipad mini that I have to use, numerous piano teachers in the forum for the app have commented that the app freezes and is draggy when run on higher versions of ios on the older hardware, since the newer the version of iOS the more resource intensive, and the app itself is very robust. I will definitely read more about family sharing, thank you!
posted by elgee at 12:13 PM on July 21, 2019