Blocking apps on your child’s phone: what it covers and what it can’t

Four ways to say no

A limit on one app. The game opens, but it lives exactly as many minutes as you allow. Your child sees the remaining time.

A limit on a category. One number for a whole group: browsers, games, media, messengers. Useful once there are twenty games and per-app limits stop making sense.

Approval for new apps. Anything installed after you turn this on stays blocked until you tap Approve.

A full device lock. The screen closes behind a PIN prompt. This one is a manual action, not a schedule.

Mixing them up is expensive. A limit on one game does not stop a second one being installed next to it, and approval for new installs does nothing about the apps already there.

Per-app limits and category limits

Limits are set in minutes: there are ready buttons for one hour, ninety minutes, two hours and three, plus a field for your own number. The list shows what has been spent today against the allowance: 40 / 60 min.

A category limit works like a shared wallet: one number for every browser, or every game. Your child decides whether to burn the hour in one game or spread it across three.

One switch deserves its own paragraph: exclude from total device time. It exists for schoolwork — Word, Anki, Zoom and the like — so time spent there does not eat the daily phone allowance. Homework stops competing with cartoons, and the argument about it ends on its own.

App approval: the setting people turn on last and regret it

The mechanism is simple: require approval for new apps. From that point every fresh install on your child’s phone is blocked, and a row appears in your Awaiting approval list with two buttons, Approve and Block.

A push notification comes with it: your child installed or launched an unfamiliar app.

Why turn it on before you start setting limits: without it you are playing catch-up. You close one game, another one gets installed, and you find out about it a week later.

The catalog: making the app list usable

A fresh app list shows everything the phone has, including system services with names like com.android.providers. Nobody can work with that, so there is a catalog: give an app a readable name, put it in a category, or hide it from the normal list.

System apps carry a separate category of their own. That is the first honest boundary here: a phone cannot be blocked from itself, so settings, the dialer and the app store stay out of reach of app blocking.

What app blocking cannot do

We promise exactly what we deliver, so the boundaries go here in plain words.

Accessibility access is required. Gardion Kids has to be enabled in the phone settings under Accessibility. Without it app blocking does not work at all. That is Android’s rule, not our choice.

Battery optimisation has to be off. Otherwise Android unloads the background service, and blocking and location go with it.

Android 8 and newer only. On iPhone, app blocking lives inside Apple’s own Screen Time. See the guide to parental controls on iPhone.

Your child will try to remove it. What they actually try, and which of it works, is covered in the piece on how kids bypass parental controls.

What the event feed shows

Every trigger lands in the feed: app blocked, app unblocked, blocked process killed, lock lifted by parent. It answers not only what happened but when, which tells you the hour of the day your child keeps hitting the wall.

When one app is genuinely needed after a lock, there is an urgent unlock: only the named app opens, only until the hour you set, and everything else stays closed.