Parental Control Apps – iPhone

If you are looking for some parental control apps, iPhone software or other useful tools to help you control what your child can do, look no further. In this article we have listed what we think to be some of the best parental control options for the iPhone in 2015.

Whilst there are some expensive monitoring programs out there, we will be focusing on three options that are either free or very cheap to use, and most importantly can be set up straight from the iPhone itself.

 

My Mobile Watchdog

My Mobile Watchdog is an iPhone app that costs users $4.95 a month, and it is the only app in this list that will cost you some money. With My Mobile Watchdog, you are able to see a lot of details about your child’s iPhone. You can see call logs, read data from text messages, and even see who your child is sending messages to.

My Mobile Watchdog also has settings to restrict access, and you can block different applications and websites through the easy to use dashboard. You can even set it so that certain content is not viewable at different times of the day. This is perfect for stopping your child staying up late at night on their iPhone.

Whilst your child will be aware of Watchdog running in the background, it provides a very versatile set of tools. Being visible isn’t such a bad thing either – it allows you to be transparent to your child about why you may be restricting certain content.

MamaBear

MamaBear is a great free option for those who don’t want to invest their cash into a parental control solution. Whilst MamaBear may not stay free forever, it is currently in beta and that means users can make use of it for free whilst the developers fix up any bugs or issues with the software.

For the most part, you won’t even notice that MamaBear is in beta though – it runs incredibly smoothly and has plenty of different features. You can view your child’s location via GPS, keep track of their social media accounts and even take notice of how fast your child may be driving. There are plenty of other features for web browsing and social media monitoring as well, and all of these features are completely free.

 

 

Free Parental Settings with App Restrictions

 

Apple’s iPhone now comes with special parental control settings built into any phone with iOS 8 or higher. These settings are called app restrictions, and they can be found within the settings menu.

With app restrictions you can block certain content types and also block access to certain apps. You can quickly block or un-block an app by going back into the settings menu and typing in the predefined parental control password you set earlier.

To use app restrictions, you need to go to settings>general>restrictions.

Once you turn on restrictions, all apps will be blocked and you can go through and manually un-block all of the applications and games you are happy for your child to use.

Fortunately, all three of these parental control apps, iPhone features and programs are capable of giving you more control over what content your child can view from their iPhone. It doesn’t take much effort to set up either of these options, but they do have varying levels of parental control.