Our daughter hacked the best parental control app for Android in 30 seconds
As parents, we all want to protect our children from the dangers of the online world. Giving our kids a smartphone at a young age is a big decision, but at some point out it’s almost inevitable, and a necessary one. In our case, after postponing as much as we could, we decided to give our daughters their first smartphone at age 9. However, before we handed over those devices, we knew we had to install a parental control app to ensure their safety. Initially, we chose a highly recommended paid app, which worked well for a few months, but we soon discovered that one of our daughters was able to bypass the app's restrictions. This post is a short recap of our journey to online safety, and a highlight of one challenge that remained unsolved.
After conducting extensive research, we chose a highly recommended paid app. At first, it worked great for our family: we were able to set time limits, block specific apps, and monitor our daughters' online activity. However, after a few months, we started to notice that even when reached their daily time limit as set in the app, one of my daughters was still able to continue using her phone, even though the app was supposed to block her usage at that point. Somehow, she found a way to bypass restrictions, and we became concerned.
We reached out to the app's support team, who advised us to uninstall and reinstall the app, along with a few changes in the phone’s settings. It was extensive, and upon completion I handed the phone to my daughter. “Give it a try now” I said. What followed was impressive 30 seconds, in which she rapidly tapped on the screen until the app was reduced to a small box and shoved to a corner. We were back to square one!
The app failed, and we knew we needed to look for a more reliable parental control option.
We decided to give Google's Family Link a try. In our original research, we decided to go with a paid app, thinking ‘you get what you paid for’, and Family Link is free. “How good can it possibly be?” we thought back then. The UI is fairly user-friendly and easy to navigate, and all the basic features we needed were covered, including:
- Screen Time Management: We were able to set daily screen time limits for our daughters' devices, ensuring they weren't spending too much time online.
- App Management: We could approve or block specific apps, so our daughters couldn't access inappropriate content.
- SafeSearch: We could enable SafeSearch to ensure our daughters wouldn't accidentally stumble upon inappropriate search results.
- Location Tracking: We could keep track of our daughters' locations, ensuring they were safe when they were out and about.
Most importantly, we saw that It works! Despite our daughters’ best efforts, they were yet to find a way to hack it!
Our journey to find the best parental control app for our daughters was a bit of a bumpy ride. We learned that even the most highly recommended and paid apps can be hacked by kids, and that it's important to stay vigilant and keep looking for better options. Google's Family Link has proven to be a reliable and effective solution for our family, and we highly recommend it to other parents looking for a free and user-friendly parental control app for their kids' Android devices. By setting screen time limits, blocking inappropriate apps, enabling SafeSearch, and keeping track of our daughters' locations, we feel confident that our kids are safe online. That being said, one key limitation of this app is that it does not address the big questions of HOW they spend their time online, and other than limiting content and time it does not help us in directing their online activity to beneficial tasks.
While we still grapple with How they choose to spend their time online, using a trustworthy parental control app like Google's Family Link gives us peace of mind and allows us to focus on fostering healthy online habits for our children.
