How to Permanently Block Porn on an iPad

If you use an iPhone for calls and texts but do most of your actual browsing on an iPad — in bed, on a couch, wherever the bigger screen is — locking down the iPhone alone won't do much. The restriction has to live on whichever device you're actually using, and for a lot of people, that's the iPad.

The good news: it's not a different system

Apple's own support documentation for Screen Time passcodes covers iPhone and iPad together, in the same article, with the same steps — Settings → Screen Time → Content & Privacy Restrictions → Limit Adult Websites, protected by a Screen Time passcode with the same optional Account Recovery setting attached to it. There's no separate, weaker, or different version of this on iPad. Everything in our full breakdown for iPhone applies to iPad exactly the same way.

The thing worth checking first: who else uses this iPad

The restriction locks the device, not the person holding it.

iPhones are almost always personal. iPads are more often shared — a household iPad left on the kitchen counter, a hand-me-down kept in a drawer for whoever needs it. Content & Privacy Restrictions apply to the iPad itself, under whichever Apple Account is signed in. Unless that iPad is specifically set up as a separate Child Account with its own sign-in, one restriction applies to everyone who picks it up — which is usually exactly what you want, but worth confirming before you assume it's only affecting you.

What permanent actually requires, on iPad or iPhone

Making the restriction genuinely hard to undo still comes down to the same two things we cover for iPhone:

1. The restriction itself

Content & Privacy Restrictions with Limit Adult Websites turned on. Two minutes, identical process to iPhone.

2. Losing your own ability to reverse it

Not knowing the passcode yourself, and turning off Screen Time Passcode Recovery so it can't just be reset through your Apple Account. Skip this step and the restriction is only ever a few taps away from being undone — see exactly where that setting appears during setup.

Doing it without relying on another person

You can set this up manually on iPad the same way as iPhone: pick a passcode you won't remember, have someone else set it, and turn off recovery. ScreenVow does the same job without needing a person to hold onto anything — it generates and encrypts the passcode itself for a period you choose, so there's nothing sitting with a partner, a friend, or in a notes app somewhere in the house. See the step-by-step setup guide to see exactly how it works on any device.