Standalone watch app design/approach for kids/family/shared watches paired with parents' phones

Hi, so, we grabbed a couple of nice new watches the other week (Ultra for dad, SE for teenage son). Mostly cool and working together (calls, messages, maps, walkie talkies, etc, etc). All good.

But then son said, "Dad, why can't I see my sleep stuff like you can..?". He was right, it wasn't working. Looking around a bit, it turns out that there are a bunch of things that are turned off or not available when pairing a kids watch with dad's phone.

From the Apple page: "The following features and apps are not available: Medications, respiratory rate, irregular heart rhythm notifications, ECG, AF History, Cycle Tracking, Sleep, Wrist Temperature, Blood Oxygen, Walking Steadiness, Audiobooks, Remote, News, Shortcuts and the double-tap gesture".

Now dev-me reacts to this situation with: "Ok, so let's just build a little standalone sleep app for son's watch. There must be lots of parents out there who would like the same thing". And there are also a bunch of other "family sharing" enabled apps that when you try and use them on kid's phone, say "iPhone requireed", i.e, they don't apparently work with just a watch hooked up to mum or dad's phone.

So before I dive into that kind of project, which seems like an obvious fix path from a dev and a parents' point of view: does anybody know if this from Apple's point of view is a hardware, a software or a legal/age limitation? What's the basic framework/dev/design issue here?

  1. Is it something on the device(s) that prevents sleep data from even being collected on family/kids paired watches? (Therefore don't bother trying to build an app); I assume not becauses it's just a normal SE used by a kid; or

  2. Is it "just" that Apple hasn't wanted to make that available without a kids iPhone too (Therefore you could certainly build a standalone app to do what Apple hasn't wanted to do); or

  3. Netiher 1 nor 2, but Apple won't even allow Sleep data collection for kids for some legal/health data reason (Therefore don't bother trying to build the app).

Standalone watch app design/approach for kids/family/shared watches paired with parents' phones
 
 
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