GardionFamily Link not working: five reasons the limits stop applying
The app is installed on both phones, the child is in the family group, the daily limit is set, and nothing happens. The phone never locks, reports come back empty, the map still shows yesterday's location. Here are five reasons Family Link stops working, ordered from the most common to the rarest.
One: the system killed the app
On the child's phone, Family Link is an ordinary app, and the phone is free to close it to save battery. Xiaomi, Honor, realme and some Samsung models do this routinely: aggressive battery saving shuts down background processes, and supervision goes down with them.
Check three settings on the child's device: whether Family Link is allowed to start automatically, whether background activity is unrestricted for it, and whether battery saver is permanently on. Once autostart is allowed, limits usually begin to apply the same day.
Two: the child's phone has no connection
Limits are enforced on the device, but commands and reports travel over the network. If the phone spent the day offline, you see empty reports, and a new schedule only arrives once the child reconnects. Airplane mode is the same story: while it is on, nothing new gets through.
Three: permissions were revoked
A system update or a settings cleanup can strip Family Link of permissions without any visible sign. On the child's phone, confirm three of them: location access set to "allow all the time", permission to display over other apps, and special access to usage data. Without the last one, screen time is counted incorrectly or not counted at all.
Four: limits never covered everything
A time limit applies to apps, but it does not block calls and messages, and some system apps stay available regardless. That is how the service is built, not a fault. The phone locks, yet the child can still call you.
Browsers belong here too. If you restricted one browser and the child opens another one that is already installed, your filter does not apply to it.
Five: the child turned 13
Google lets teenagers manage their own account from a certain age and leave supervision on their own. A notice appears on the teen's phone, and the parent receives an email about it. Nothing broke. Supervision was switched off from the inside, and it can only be restored with the teenager's consent.
If none of that helped
Work through it in order. Make sure both phones are online and signed in to the same family account. Open Family Link on the child's device and confirm it is connected to the right profile. Grant the permissions again. If the limits are still ignored, reinstall the app and link the device from scratch.
When even that changes nothing, the phone's own software layer is usually to blame: it closes supervision in the background faster than supervision can act.
How Gardion handles this
We built for exactly the conditions above. The app runs as a service, survives reboots and aggressive battery saving, and shows the same picture in the mobile app and in the web dashboard: time spent in apps, limits and schedule. Rules are enforced on the device itself, so going offline does not cancel a limit.
If parental controls on Android already switched themselves off, we have a <a href="/blog/parental-controls-stopped-working-android">separate walkthrough of the settings</a> behind it.
In short
Usually the "allow all the time" location permission was revoked, or battery saving is on for the app. Check both on the child's phone.
Check special access to usage data and autostart. Without them screen time is not counted, so the limit never arrives.
Install it again and link the device. To make deletion harder, restrict installing and removing apps in the supervision settings.
Family Link is a Google service, so both the parent and the child need Google accounts. Tools that do not depend on a single vendor's account work differently, and that is the approach we took in Gardion.
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