Questions, answered properly

Create an account in a browser, download the installer for your PC or Mac, sign in inside it, choose whether you are setting up an Android device or the computer itself, follow the wizard, then customise everything from your dashboard. The same six steps with detail on each.

Signing in inside the installer and the Android-or-this-computer choice are being built right now. Until they land, testers are given the two installers separately and a pairing code links the device to your account.

You need a computer once, to set up an Android device — supervision is granted over a USB cable and there is no over-the-air route to it. After that a phone is enough forever: the dashboard is a web app, and adding it to your home screen from Safari or Chrome makes it behave like an installed app. There is nothing to fetch from the App Store.

Yes, and it is the same product, the same account and the same dashboard rather than a separate purchase. Windows and macOS get a filtering resolver, browser policy, network rules, execution blocks and a child session holding only the programs you chose. What each one installs.

On an Android tablet or phone, yes. One toggle rests that device: the apps you marked essential — an alarm, a way to call you — stay reachable and everything else stops. Schedules do the same thing on a timetable, from the device's own clock, so they still fire with the internet down.

It is not instantaneous. The device asks this server for its settings on a cycle, so expect a switch to land within about half a minute rather than the moment you tap. A computer running the agent does not have this switch yet.

In most cases, yes. Android only grants supervision to a device with no accounts signed in, so a tablet already in use has to be reset first. Back up photos and anything else that matters, reset, run setup, then sign back in.

A brand-new tablet out of the box needs no reset — set it up with ParentProof before you sign into anything.

No. Supervision does not remove Google Play or block Google accounts. You sign in after setup and Play works normally. What is blocked is sideloading — installing an APK from a browser or a file — which is a different thing.

On an Amazon Fire the answer is different, because there is no Play Store to begin with. The Fire situation in full.

About ten minutes per tablet once you have the cable in hand, plus the reset if one is needed. It is a one-time job — day-to-day changes are made from your dashboard in a browser, not over USB.

You need to be able to follow a wizard and plug in a USB cable. The parts that are genuinely fiddly — turning on developer options, removing an account, Samsung's Auto Blocker — are each explained on screen at the moment they are needed, with the exact taps for your device.

The usual routes are closed: there is no toggle in Settings, safe mode is blocked, a second user profile cannot be created, the tablet cannot be reset from itself, and sideloading is off. Those are enforced by Android, not by an app that can be killed.

What we will not tell you is that it is unbeatable. A physical factory reset through the recovery menu removes supervision — it also wipes the tablet, and you will notice. Someone with a computer, real intent and time can do things a filter cannot prevent. If your teenager is at that level, the honest answer is that this is a conversation, not a product.

There is a switch for that: it blocks changing the date and time on the tablet. It is optional because on some devices it also gets in the way of legitimate things, so you decide.

Changing private DNS can be blocked, and that switch is in your hands. A VPN app would have to be installed first, and installing apps is under your control.

The tablet stays locked down. Policy is enforced on the device; our server is how you change it, not how it is applied. An outage means you cannot adjust settings for a while. It does not mean the tablet opens up.

Not quite, and the distinction is worth understanding before you rely on it. Apps are allow-only: nothing opens unless you named it. Sites are filtered rather than allow-listed — you choose a family-safe resolver, supervision pins it so it cannot be changed on the tablet, and adult and gambling domains stop resolving.

That filtering reaches every app that uses the device's own name lookups, which is most of them. It does not reach an app that ships its own encrypted lookups, and a site opened by raw address is never looked up at all. Both of those are still bounded by the allow-list, because an app you did not allow cannot open in the first place. The full picture.

Not yet, and we are not going to imply otherwise on a page a parent reads before buying. What works today is the part that needs no judgement: an app you did not allow does not open, and a filtered resolver refuses adult and gambling domains.

The layer that sorts an address nobody has classified into a category — so you can write one rule instead of naming sites, and choose to be told rather than to block — is written and costed but is not connected to a model for families. When it is, this answer changes. Which half is which.

No, and it is not a policy we intend to follow — it is a constraint in the database. Suicide lines, gambling self-exclusion, sexual health and abuse support are marked unblockable, and the table that stores your rules refuses to save a rule that blocks one. Only your own explicit rule about a specific address can override that.

No. We do not collect message content, and we are not building a surveillance feed for you to read. The dashboard shows what was blocked and what was used — the information a parent needs to set a rule — not a transcript of a child's life.

No, and it is enforced in code rather than promised in a policy. Marketing events and child data are separated by a filter that refuses any payload carrying a device identifier or child telemetry — regardless of what the event claims to be. The detail.

Deleting the account removes the household and everything attached to it — devices, profiles, policies, activity. Ask us and we will confirm it is gone.

Almost always one of three things: USB debugging is not on, the "Allow USB debugging?" prompt on the tablet has not been accepted, or the cable is charge-only. The setup app checks each and says which. If it still cannot see it, send us a report from inside the app — it attaches what it saw, so we can usually find the cause without asking you to reproduce it.

Press the report button in the setup app or the "Something not working?" card in your dashboard, and describe it in your own words. Technical detail is attached automatically, redacted, and only if you leave that box ticked. That is genuinely enough — you do not need to diagnose anything.

Each installer has a reverse and each one is documented on the support page. The tablet can be handed back to you unsupervised, and the computer installers restore what they changed.