App Activity

Each row is an app: its icon, its real name, the minutes it used in the period you are looking at, its category, and its current rule. Ranking by time rather than alphabetically is the whole point, because the top three rows usually account for most of the phone. Parents who have never seen this list almost always find the order surprising in one direction or another.

The period selector across the top switches between today, yesterday, the last seven days and the last month. Today tells you what is happening right now, which is the view you want when an evening has gone strangely quiet. The seven day view is the one worth actually reading, because a single Tuesday tells you very little and a week tells you the shape of the phone.

Apps installed recently carry a new badge, and the row shows the date they arrived. Apps that are installed but have not been opened at all still appear, at the bottom, with zero minutes. That sounds like clutter but it is deliberate: an app sitting unopened is still a fact about the phone, and it is often the first thing a parent wants to ask about.

• Every installed app, ranked by time used.
• Today, yesterday, seven days or a month.
• Install date, with recent arrivals flagged.
• The rule on each app: allowed, limited or blocked.

The first signal is the usage record Android already keeps, which notes the app in the foreground and how long it stayed there. The child app reads that with a permission your child grants during setup, on a system screen, by hand. Time is measured only while the screen is on and the app is in front, so a phone in a pocket accrues nothing and a paused video stops counting.

The second is the list of installed packages, which is how new arrivals get spotted. When a package appears that was not there before, the row is created, the install date is recorded and the flag is raised. That is a list of names, nothing more. No file from inside an app is read, copied or examined at any point.

Categories come from the app’s own store listing where one exists, with a small correction list of our own for the handful that classify themselves oddly. Where nothing is available the app arrives as uncategorised and you can file it yourself, which takes one tap and applies from then on.

Reporting happens in short batches rather than instantly, so today’s figures can trail by a few minutes. Nothing gets lost while a phone is offline: the record is held on the device and sent when signal returns, and the times stay correct rather than bunching up at the moment of reconnection.

When something new is installed you get one notification with the app name, the category, and the time it arrived. That is the alert most parents say they wanted all along, because it is where the genuinely new things enter a phone: a chat app with strangers in it, a game with a live voice channel, a browser installed specifically to get around a filter.

The useful response is almost never to block it immediately. A new app is information, not an offence, and most of them are exactly what they look like. Open the row, read the category, look at what it has actually been used for over the next day or two, and ask about it in an ordinary voice. Silent deletion of something a child installed on purpose teaches concealment faster than any other single action.

Two patterns are worth taking seriously. The first is an app that arrives and is uninstalled again within a day or two, repeatedly, which usually means something is being used and then hidden. The second is a second browser or a proxy style app appearing on a phone that already has a browser, which is generally an attempt to get around web filtering rather than a sudden interest in software. Both are conversations, not confiscations.

Allowed is the default and means the app counts against the daily budget like everything else. Limited means it carries a cap of its own, so an app can run out while the rest of the day continues. Blocked means it stays behind a cover screen at all times, without being uninstalled or deleted, and the block lifts the moment you change your mind.

Category rules save you doing this fifty times. Setting a bedtime cover or a cap on Games applies to every app filed as a game, including ones installed next month, which is the part that matters. Categories are how you stop maintaining a list by hand.

Where a category rule and an app rule disagree, the app rule wins. That precedence exists because the exception is almost always the point: Games may be capped at forty minutes while the one game a child plays with a cousin every Sunday is allowed, or Education may be uncapped while one so called learning app that is mostly adverts carries a firm limit. Set the broad rule with a category, then correct it one app at a time.

Some things cannot be blocked from this screen at all. The dialler, emergency calling, the system settings and the clock stay available whatever rule you write, because a parental control tool that can strand a child without a working phone has failed in a much more serious way than one that lets a game through.

Read the week, not the day. Any single day contains a long train journey, a sick afternoon, or a group project, and none of those mean anything on their own. Seven days shows you the pattern: which app is genuinely dominant, whether the evening has crept later, and whether last week’s change made any difference at all.

Time is not the same as harm. Ninety minutes of a game played with friends in a voice channel is a social evening, and twenty minutes of an app that leaves your child upset every time is a bigger problem. The list gives you duration because duration is what can be measured honestly, and the interpretation stays with the person who knows the child.

The best use of this screen is as the opening of a conversation rather than the end of one. “You spent four hours in that this week, what is happening in it” gets you an answer. Silently capping the app at forty minutes gets you a workaround, usually within a fortnight, and often one you will not find on the list because it happens on somebody else’s device.

It never sees inside an app. It knows an app was open and for how long. It does not know what was typed, sent, received, watched, posted or read. There is no message content, no screenshotting, no screen recording, no keystroke logging, no camera access and no microphone access anywhere in this product, and no setting that turns any of that on.

It does not uninstall or alter anything. Blocking places a cover over an app; the app itself, its data and its account remain untouched, and removing the block restores it instantly. Nothing is deleted from a phone by us, ever, and no purchase or account is interfered with.

It does not judge. There is no risk score on an app, no cheerful warning that a child is using something too much, and no ranking against other families. The list reports names, categories and minutes, and stops there, because a number delivered with a verdict attached gets defended rather than discussed.

It is not invisible. Your child’s phone lists every rule you have written, names any app you have blocked, and shows the same categories from their side. If you are looking for a tool that manages a phone without the person holding it knowing, this is deliberately not that tool.