The scoreboard the whole room can see, and the three things it cannot do

The problem

Why put a scoreboard on the television at all?

Siblings compare. "That's not fair" is one of the eight problems the app asks about on its very first screen, and it shows up most often in a house with more than one child earning credits, where most of the complaint comes from not being able to see what the other one actually has. A phone in one parent's pocket does not settle that argument, because nobody but the parent can look at it.

A screen in the room everyone already sits in front of does settle it. The number on the television is the same number the parent's phone would show, at the same moment, to anyone in the room, so a dispute over who is ahead ends the moment somebody looks up at it rather than asking a parent to referee from memory.

It also removes a smaller, quieter friction: a child asking to see their own balance, over and over, because the only place it lives is a device somebody else is holding. Put it on the television instead and the asking mostly stops, because looking is not a request anymore.

None of that needs a child to have their own phone or their own Kid Mode session at all. A household with one shared iPad in Kid Mode and a television in the living room already covers most of what a family needs: one device to do the work on, one screen to see where everyone stands.

What it shows

What actually appears on the screen?

The Apple TV app shows every child in the household, each one's current balance, and how much progress they have made that day. Selecting a child opens a per-child detail view, and from there the full ledger is available too, with the reason behind every credit movement shown exactly as it would be on a phone.

It is reading the same household data the parent's iPhone reads. There is no separate, simplified copy of the numbers built just for the television, and no delay for it to catch up.

The tvOS app also carries its own in-app language picker, separate from the twelve the phone app supports, and it exists as a distinct setting on purpose: tvOS has no per-app language setting of its own, so without it the television would be stuck showing whatever language the Apple TV's system menu happens to be set to, regardless of what the family actually speaks.

What it cannot do

Why can't a child approve their own task from the couch?

The Apple TV app cannot approve a task, cannot change a balance, and cannot let anyone buy a reward. All three of those are removed entirely, not hidden behind a setting or a PIN a child might work out.

• No approval control exists on the Apple TV app, for any task.
• No balance can be adjusted from it, up or down.
• No reward can be purchased from it, at any price.

This is a stricter rule than most households would set for themselves by hand. A parent handing a child a phone unlocked to the reward shop is trusting that child not to tap past what was agreed. The television never puts that choice in front of anyone, because the option to buy something from it does not exist to be tapped in the first place.

The app states its own reasoning for this plainly: "A remote in a child's hand must not be able to approve their own chores." A Siri Remote is the only input device most households own for their television, and it usually ends up in whichever hand reached for it first. Reward Study treats that as a reason to remove the capability, not a reason to add a lock on top of it.

That is also why the Apple TV app does not need the Face ID, Touch ID or PIN gate that guards a parent action everywhere else in the app. There is nothing behind the screen worth locking, because there is nothing on the screen that changes anything. Removing the capability made the lock unnecessary in this one place, rather than the other way around.

The mechanism

Where does the real work still happen?

Everything the Apple TV app cannot do still happens exactly where it always did: on a parent's phone, through the approvals queue that nothing counts until you approve describes in full. A child still marks a task done and still requests a reward from their own device, whether that is a borrowed phone in Kid Mode or their own device entirely, covered in kid mode or their own device. The television only ever displays what has already been decided.

That split, one screen that shows and several that decide, is what lets the scoreboard live somewhere public without turning the living room into an unsupervised approval terminal. It is the same principle behind the ledger itself: every credit movement is recorded with its reason, who issued it, and what it links to, so the television is never showing a bare number without the history that explains how it got there, one tap away in the per-child detail view.

A Pro subscription covers the Apple TV app the same way it covers everything else in the household, alongside as many children as the family needs and the two households described in two homes, two households: see pricing for what is included.