My oldest is about to move from her Gabb phone to an iPhone.
I'm an Android user, so this is not something I'm familiar with.

My wife is an Apple user, so I assume it would all be through her phone/acct.

Does Apple have built in parental controls, and to what extent can they be leveraged?
Or, is there a 3rd party app that can manage it better?

Plenty available.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/105121

https://support.apple.com/guid...ols-iph00ba7d632/ios

I have a hunch smart kids can get around things and are sneaky. This includes figuring out their parents four/six digit codes.

But that goes for any phone.

Thanks, will give those a read later. I figured it had to exist.

Apple's parental controls work surprisingly well. I put them on my son's iPod Touch and iMac we got him when he was 9, and later on his iPhone.

I tested the iMac and yes it was able to filter out most anything inappropriate I could think of.

Just remember the damn password. My ex set the controls on his iPhone and forgot the password she set. Once he got a new phone around when he turned 18 it was no longer an issue.

Just remember that many if not most other parents are too dumb to activate controls on their kids phones so no matter what you do, someone they know will have unrestricted access...