Best Parental Monitoring apps for iPhone and iPad
These apps help you monitor your child's iPhone or iPad so you can see exact app and web activity.
If you are trying to ensure your child uses an iPhone or iPad in a safe way, you should consider using a parental monitoring app. A good iPhone parental monitoring app can give you complete visibility into your child's activity on their device so that you can prevent risky behavior. If you are trying to restrict access to harmful websites and apps, monitoring can help you realize if there are additional apps or websites that should be blocked so that your "blocking system" is even more thorough. Furthermore, when a child knows that a monitoring app is being used, they are more likely to make wiser decisions since they know that their activities can be seen.
Choosing an effective parental monitoring app for iPhone
If you want to monitor a kids iPhone properly, there are a few key features to look out for.
There are numerous parental monitoring apps that claim to be effective, but many provide a false sense that you actually know what your child is seeing on the device.
Kids can easily look up what monitoring gaps exist in these apps and exploit them to bypass parental monitoring.
Full app monitoring
The ideal parental monitoring app on iPhone should capture exactly what your child is seeing no matter what app they use.
For example, you should be able to monitor what your child is watching on YouTube .
Not just how long they have been on the app or who they are subscribed to (like many monitoring solutions tell you), but exactly what videos and shorts they are viewing.
Screen accountability iPhone apps like LivingRoom for Families tend to provide full app monitoring since they take periodic screenshots.
Parental oversight into apps that are accessed in Safari or Chrome
Another challenge with parental monitoring apps is that they need to also monitor apps that are accessed via a web browser like Safari or Chrome.
For example, you might
block an iPhone app
and think that your child can't access it, but usually these apps can be opened in Safari by going to that app's website (like opening youtube.com in a Safari private window).
A parental monitoring app can at least ensure that you have full visibility into what your child is doing on an app, no matter if they use the app downloaded from the App Store or accessed in a Safari private window.
Parental monitoring of pages or images viewed in Safari or Chrome
Parental monitoring apps on an iPhone are most useful if you are able to see specific pages your child is visiting in a web browser and the actual content of those pages.
It's simply not enough to monitor which websites are visited since the issue tends to be with "mixed content" websites where the underlying domain name doesn't indicate inappropriate content.
For example, a child might visit reddit.com, but you wouldn't know if inappropriate content were being accessed since that website provides a wide-range of content.
Fortunately, iPhone parental monitoring apps can be used to see what images, videos, or specific website pages are being viewed on your child's device.
Parental monitoring for disappearing messaging apps like Snapchat
As we've detailed in our parent's guide to Snapchat , there's a significant challenge parent's face when allowing a child to use a private messaging app where messages are automatically deleted.
It's not easy to simply pick up your child's iPhone and see their message history to ensure you catch problematic behavior.
This is where a screenshot-based parental monitoring app like LivingRoom for Families is ideal.
It not only monitors snapchat conversations by taking screenshots, but also informs chat participants that the conversation is being monitored by a parent.
This monitoring app reduces Snapchat risk by notifying strangers that the chat will be seen by a parent.
Parental monitoring apps on iPhone that take periodic screenshots
The most ideal approach to parental monitoring on iOS is to use an app that records the full screen and captures screenshots periodically. This approach captures exactly what your child is seeing, almost as if you were sitting next to them.
There are a few notable parental monitoring apps that use screenshots to capture device activity:
- LivingRoom for Families , which is a new app that records the entire screen and captures screenshots in any app used on a child's iPhone or iPad.
- Covenant Eyes , which is a well known app that captures screenshots. However, it's important to note that it only captures screenshots in Safari, so it isn't a comprehensive monitoring solution for parents who want to see all activity on a child's device.
Traditional parental monitoring apps
There are a few well-known parental monitoring apps for iPhone that use traditional monitoring approaches to try to capture as much activity on a child's device as possible. However, as many parents quickly discover, these apps
- Qustodio , which provides some information
- Bark, which is known for monitoring iPhone text messages and other app and website activity
These apps attempt to monitor as much activity as possible, but they fall short from truly showing what a child is viewing since they do not use screen recording or screenshots to monitor the device.