GardionYour child asks you to approve an app: where that button lives
“Mom, approve this app” — and then twenty minutes of hunting through settings. The reason is simple: that one phrase covers three different things, and each of them is switched on in a different place. Here is which button opens which door, what it actually allows, and why one approval sometimes lets your child install another ten apps without asking.
Three permissions people mix up
Before you look for a button, work out which of the three doors your child is asking you to open.
Download a new app from Google Play. This one is about the store: your child found a game, tapped Install, and hit a request addressed to you.
Open an app that is already on the phone. It is installed, but a rule blocks it or its daily limit has run out. The store has nothing to do with it.
Install an app from outside the store: an APK file from a browser or a third-party store. Google Play never sees this, and the permission involved is a different one.
The answer to “where is the button” is different for each door, so take them in order.
Door one: downloading from Google Play
This one is handled by the purchase approval setting. You can turn it on in either of two places: in the Family Link app, under your child, Settings, Google Play, Approvals; or in Google Play itself, under Settings, Family, Manage family members, the member, Purchase approvals.
There are four levels: all content, paid content only, in-app purchases only, and never. Pick the first one and even a free game needs your consent before it installs.
When your child hits the request, the screen offers two routes. Send a message sends the request to your phone. Ask now lets you approve it right there on the child’s device. Either way, the confirmation is your Google account password.
One snag catches people out here: if you have several children, you set this separately for each one.
The gap Google documents openly
Family Link’s help contains a sentence that explains half of all parent questions: your child can download apps that were installed or approved before, and anything in your Google Play Family Library, without asking you again.
Approval covers the first install. Delete a game, reinstall it a month later, and no new request reaches you. This is not a bug or a workaround. It is how the feature is built.
That leads to something practical. If you dislike an app, answering “no” to one request is not enough. Block it with a rule, or it comes back quietly.
Door two: the app is installed but will not open
The store is not involved here, and the purchase approval setting will not help. The app stays silent for one of three reasons: you blocked it by hand, its daily limit has run out, or downtime is running.
In Family Link, blocking and unblocking live under screen time, in the app limits. Google describes the behavior step by step: a change takes about five minutes to apply, or applies as soon as the phone comes back online. We went through that delay in the article on remote parental controls.
If an app stopped opening suddenly and you changed no rules, the cause may sit outside parental controls altogether. Why controls go quiet on Android is a separate breakdown.
Door three: installing from unknown sources
The most underrated of the three. An app can be installed as an APK file, bypassing Google Play: downloaded in a browser, received in a messenger, taken from a third-party store. Purchase approval settings do not reach this route, because it goes around the store.
Android handles it with a separate system permission, Install unknown apps. It is not granted once per phone: you grant it to each app separately, to the browser, the messenger and the file manager. The exact path depends on your Android version and skin, but look under special app access.
Check it app by app. Most often the permission turns out to be granted to the browser or the messenger the file arrives through.
How we built this in Gardion
We put the same logic on one screen, so you do not walk through three different settings.
The parent app has an App approval section with a switch called Require approval for new apps. The line under it states the rule: a new app is blocked until you approve it.
Here is how it works. When an unfamiliar app appears on your child’s phone or computer, it joins a queue marked Awaiting approval and is blocked immediately, so it will not run until you decide. Each entry in the queue has two buttons, Approve and Block. An approved app starts working; a blocked one stays off.
Along the way the system files the app under one of four categories: browsers, games, messengers, or media. With the category it inherits that group’s limit. If games get an hour a day, a new game gets that same hour rather than a free evening until you notice.
The switch is off by default. While it is off, new apps simply show up in the list and live by the general rules.
If your child has an iPhone
Apple solves this inside Screen Time, which handles both the child’s request and the parent’s answer, including “give me a bit more time.”
Gardion does not run on iPhone. We say so plainly and do not sell what we do not have. What Screen Time can do, and where its purchase restrictions sit, is covered in the article on parental controls on iPhone.
What to remember
“Approve an app” means three different doors: the store, an app that is already installed, and installation from outside the store.
Google Play approval covers the first install only, so previously approved apps and Family Library downloads arrive without a new request.
Installation from unknown sources bypasses the store and is closed with a separate system permission, granted per app.
In Gardion one switch replaces all of that: a new app is blocked until you tap Approve.
In short
The request arrives in the Family Link app on the parent’s phone. If the notification got lost, open Family Link, pick your child and look under request management. There is a second route: approve it on the child’s device. Your child taps Ask now, and you enter your Google account password.
Approval covers the first install. Google states that apps installed or approved earlier, along with Family Library content, download without a new permission. To keep an app away, block it with a rule, because one rejected request is not enough.
That is a separate Android system permission, and it is granted to each app individually. Check under special app access to see which programs have Install unknown apps turned on. Usually it is the browser or a messenger, and those are the ones to switch off.
No, that is a different door. It happens with a manual block, an exhausted daily limit or downtime. In Family Link this lives under screen time, and a change reaches the phone in about five minutes or when the network comes back.
With Require approval for new apps turned on, the app joins the queue and is blocked until you decide. The queue gives you two buttons, Approve and Block. The app also lands in its category and inherits that group’s limit.
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Try GardionRead next
- Remote parental controls: what you can really do from your own phoneWhat a parent changes at a distance and what still needs the child’s phone in hand. Family Link, Screen Time and Gardion compared, with the delays and the limits.
- Parental controls on Xiaomi: why they go quiet, and what Second space isHyperOS unloads the control app from memory, and a child creates a second space where your rules do not exist. Four settings, and one feature nobody writes about.
- Parental controls on iPhone: what Screen Time can doApple has no separate parental control app: everything lives inside Screen Time. What it does, which of its limits are structural, and what Apple adds this fall.