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.

Blocking one app. The app stays on the phone but will not open until you lift the block.

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 blocking one game leaves the others alone.

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.

New programs without a category

If your child installs a program that does not land in any category, the home screen of the parent app shows a New programs without a category card. Each program there shows the minutes used today and a Choose a category button.

Until a program has a category, limits for games, browsers and other groups do not apply to it. A program that is wrong for your child can be blocked in the app list.

Check this card the same day. Otherwise you are playing catch-up: you close one game, another one gets installed, and its minutes fall outside every group limit.

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.