It’s a common situation these days: your child seems to have become addicted to a new game on their phone or they spend too much time on social media. At times, drastic steps have to be taken and that can involve blocking the app completely. Luckily, there are various methods to achieve this. Some are built into devices and others require specialist parental control software to really do the trick.
iOS users will know that Apple, despite its many benefits, doesn’t always make things easy. Blocking apps is no exception. With the introduction of Screen Time with iOS 12, Apple users are now able to block certain apps. It doesn’t work perfectly since it only restricts categories of apps and not individual ones. This means if you wanted to block let’s say, Snapchat, it would mean you’d have to block the whole category of social media apps which, obviously, isn’t practical.
Similarly, Android users have a frustrating experience using the Google Play store which can only restrict apps by age preferences. To make matters worse, nowadays children access apps through multiple devices which can mean needing to block the app over and over again – a time-consuming process.
This is where parental control software comes to the rescue. Instead of having to rely on inadequate default settings to block apps, specialist software like Norton Family Premier and Qustodio do exactly that. Such software is able to see exactly what apps are installed on your child’s devices and can show you how much time has been spent on these applications. From there you’ll be able to enable time restrictions or completely block an app altogether. This is what makes parental control software so effective. Apple and Android would much rather consumers installed more apps than block existing ones. To put it in a less cynical way, they’re simply not designed with parents in mind. That’s why we’d always recommend parents invest in proper parental control software over any default settings.