Runs in the background without draining the iOS battery.Social media monitoring for Facebook and Instagram.Create a personalized screen time schedule for each child.Mobicip: Sets Limits on Screentime, App Usage, and Customize a Web Filter In any case, you don’t have to enter your credit card information, so you can try it completely free. This will give you enough time to determine whether you need the premium features or if you can get by with just the Jr.
I recommend starting with the Bark Sr plan, which includes a 7-day free trial. The Jr plan includes screen time tools, web filters, and location check-in options, while the Sr plan also has social media monitoring tools. While you don’t get the information in real-time, I still thought it was a good workaround. Once the upload is complete, Bark scans the day’s data and sends an alert or warning if it detects anything that it deems inappropriate.
The app records everything that your child does on their iOS device, and then, every 6 hours, it will upload a backup to the Bark for Windows or Bark for Mac app, as long as you’re on the same wifi network. The filter uses AI to understand the content and has an extensive list of keywords and phrases, including slang, that will trigger an alert.īark found a unique way to get around Apple’s strict monitoring guidelines. The web filter has 19 categories that focus on child-health issues, such as depression, eating disorders, cyberbullying, alcohol, drugs, violence, and more. I found this extremely helpful since it sent alerts about potentially dangerous or inappropriate conversations, even if my child logged in from a friend’s phone or computer. It scans all the content and sends alerts when it finds posts, messages, comments, or videos that trigger its sensor.īark connects directly with each social media account. I was able to connect Bark with over 30 social media apps on iOS. The screen time management tools will shut off the internet at bedtime, making it impossible for my children to use their phones in bed, even after I tell them it’s lights-out. The web filter allows me to blocks specific websites and general website categories, such as anything related to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, and more.
With a recent update that added a web filter and screen time management for iPhones and iPads, Bark quickly became one of my favorite parental control apps.
I was really happy that Qustodio works on multiple platforms, so I was able to access the parent dashboard from my Android phone and PC and monitor the iPhone and iPad in the house.
It also has a geofence feature that alerts me when they enter or leave the radius of the location. There’s no need to worry about where they’re going or where they are at any given time. I can log in to the parent dashboard and see exactly where they are, superimposed on Google Maps. One of the tools that truly gives me peace of mind is real-time location tracking. The one problem I have with the calendar option is that you can only block time in segments of 1-hour chunks, which doesn’t fit with the schedule in our house. When I was testing Qustodio, I liked the time management tools, which allowed me to set a daily time limit and set up a daily calendar of when the devices are locked. I challenged my children to find a trick or hack to bypass the filters, and after a few days, they had to admit defeat.
Qustodio checks the metadata, text, and images for anything that would trigger one of the 30 categories. It also gives me the flexibility to choose the filter’s sensitivity, based on the kid’s ages, instead of having a default filter for the whole family. For starters, the web filter is compatible with Safari (and Chrome). Qustodio was able to succeed in monitoring my kid’s iPhone, where most other monitoring apps failed. Access parent dashboard from any device.Best Parental Control for iPhone & iPad.IPVanish VPN vs Private Internet Access.