Today I am looking at Familoop Parental Control from Familoop. This app/service is available for both Android and iOS devices. Today I looked at the Android version.
There is so much “stuff” out there today that did not exist years ago when I was growing up. Parents have a lot of work on their hands if they want to protect their children from it. Now as a parent myself, I know it is impossible to stop it all, but if parents are proactive they can have an impact.
Familoop Parental Control is an app you can install on your child’s mobile device to monitor/keep track of their activity. Some of the key items is tracks is:
- websites
- inappropriate apps
- phone locator
- photos
- contacts
Now Familoop Parental Control is a paid service. You can monitor up to three devices free for ten days but after that is $39.99 per year. There are other services out there but I did not go and do a price comparison. Setup is pretty easy. First you need to setup an account. Once that is done, you will then setup your child’s profile and their device. All of this can be done online via your desktop or app. I preferred working on the desktop. The final step then is to install the app on your child’s device.
As the parent, you will spend most of your time online, in the Familoop hub, where you can see what is going here. Within the online hub, you can check their history, monitor apps, set permissions, etc. If you have any questions on what to do or how to do it, the developer has a very informative website FAQ section.
Overall I am impressed with this app/service. I found the hub/interface to be easy to navigate and understand. I did not have any trouble figuring stuff out and appreciated that I could customize the layout. My children are old enough and do not need monitoring but if they were, I would definitely have a service such as Familoop Parental Control in place.
As I mentioned earlier, the app is available for both Android and iOS. Because they are different operating systems, the service monitors different things between the two. You can check out their website for the details.
If you decide to use this app/service, talk with your children, and let them know why and what you are going to be monitoring. There needs to be some matter of trust, but parents also need to be smart and proactive. Not to get into a lecture on parenting but if you are upfront with your kids, I think it will go better than trying to hide this on them.
Smartphone and other mobile devices are very important tools but children need to be careful with what they access and parents need to be able to protect the young ones. Familoop Parental Control gives you that ability for both Android and iOS devices.
