“It does not offer any further functionality than the free version… The app itself also yielded very strange and confusing reports. “If you are an Apple iOS user, do not buy the premium version,” cautioned a reviewer in the iTunes App Store, giving it just one star. And because of Apple’s restrictions, not all of Qustodio’s features are available for kids on iPhones: Qustodio, for instance, can monitor text messages and phone calls only on Android phones. On the iPhone, Qustodio also repeatedly and inaccurately claimed that our child was visiting Amazon Qustodio notes that its feed reports some third-party advertisements or content. Qustodio has a list of all of the apps it can monitor on the iPhone: as of this review, there are only about 70. The only way to stop our child from playing by using parental controls was to block access to the entire phone manually. When our kids were playing Hatch, a digital pet game on the iPhone, for example, it could not stop them from playing it when time was up. On the iPhone, the paid version of Qustodio is more limited: Although it can block a particular set of popular kids apps, such as Fortnite and YouTube, it cannot identify all apps on the iPhone.

Parents still need to check the content filters on individual apps for instance, in the Netflix app, parents need to designate that it is for kids only.įinally, Qustodio is a good choice only for kids with Android phones.

(Google also cautions parents that “no filter is perfect, but this should help hide sexually explicit and violent sites.”) Note, again, that the filters apply only to Chrome, Google’s browser, and Google Play. Like all of the parental controls options we tested, Google Family Link blocks mature sites and content, but in this case, the default settings are set to mature and requires a parent to change them manually. The app stopped us from purchasing gold coins in the digital pet game Pululu, but it did not prevent us from making a purchase in the Etsy app. Note, however, that it blocks only in-app purchases of content such as a virtual sword blocking does not apply to purchases of actual goods inside shopping apps. Inside Google Family Link, parents can also require kids to seek approval for any in-app purchases, purchases in the Google Play store, or downloads of new apps.

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