How this site is written and checked

Who writes it

Every page on this site is written by a person with a real name, a WordPress account on this site and a public profile that says what they do here. The byline under each page title names the writer, shows the date the page last changed and, where a second person has read the page against the product, names them too. Profiles are listed at the foot of this page and on the about page; they are generated from the user accounts themselves, so a name that appears in a byline is a name that can log in.

We do not publish under invented names, house pseudonyms or a generic “editorial team”. If no author profile is complete enough to display, the byline shows the Updated date alone and the authors section shows nothing. A missing name is more honest than a made-up one. Guest contributions are not accepted, and no page on the site has been bought, sponsored or supplied by a third party.

The writers are the same people who build the app and answer the support inbox. That is a strength and a weakness: they know what the product does in detail, and they have an interest in you using it. The section on the conflict of interest below says how we handle the second part.

A “Checked by” name in a byline means a second person, different from the writer, has read the page with the app open and confirmed each product claim on the date shown. It does not mean a lawyer, a doctor or an outside expert has endorsed it; we do not claim credentials nobody here holds. Pages about law, such as the terms and the privacy policy, describe what we do and what we ask of you, and are not legal advice for your country.

What we test on

Every statement about what the child app does, shows or needs is checked against the app running on two real Android phones: a Samsung Galaxy A-series handset and a Google Pixel, both on a current release of Android. We keep those two because between them they cover the two permission and battery-optimisation behaviours most parents meet, and because the demo family carries the same pair, Amara’s Galaxy A35 and Noah’s Pixel 7a. When a feature behaves differently on the two phones, the page says which one does what.

Claims about the parent panel are checked in Chrome, Safari and Firefox, on a laptop and on an iPhone, because the parent side is a website and must work wherever a parent happens to be. Screens described on a page are the screens as they appear in those browsers on the date the page was last updated. A panel feature that only works in one browser is not described as if it works in all three.

Android changes every year and manufacturers change it further, so a description of a permission dialog or a battery setting is tied to the phones and versions we had in hand when the page was last updated. When a new Android release moves a setting, the pages that quote its path are rechecked on both test phones and corrected, and their Updated dates move with the text. A path that is right on the Pixel and wrong on the Galaxy is written out both ways rather than averaged.

Worked examples use the demo family, the Okafors, with the same places, times and devices on every page. The demo data is written by hand to look like an ordinary school week, and it is the same data a visitor sees in the read-only demo. We do not use a real family’s data in any example, screenshot or test, and we do not pair a child’s phone for testing purposes without that child knowing exactly what is being tested.

Sources and claims

Three kinds of source are allowed. The first is Android’s own documentation and the permission dialogs the system shows, which we quote as they appear on the test phones. The second is the behaviour of the app as observed on those phones and in the panel. The third is a platform’s own published settings, such as the privacy controls inside WhatsApp or the supervision tools in Instagram, which we describe as we saw them on the date shown on the page. Where a page quotes another app’s or platform’s settings, it is describing that app on that date, and the settings may have moved since.

No page on this site contains an invented statistic. We do not lean on an unnamed study, a vague “research” or a claim about what most parents find, and in practice we avoid that kind of sentence altogether rather than hunt for a source to prop it up. Numbers that appear in our copy are either observed on the test phones, such as the rough accuracy of a location reading indoors versus outdoors, or are product facts, such as the radius of a saved place or the life of a pairing code. The one proportion we do quote, that about three in four “stopped reporting” cases come down to battery optimisation, comes from our own support inbox and is labelled as such.

There are no testimonials on this site, no star ratings and no reviewer names. A quote in a page is either from the demo family, which is fictional and presented as such, or is unattributed and illustrative. We do not attribute words to a real parent who has not written them, and we do not name a real person as a satisfied customer. Pricing of other companies’ products is never quoted, because it changes and we would get it wrong.

Where AI is and isn’t used

AI tools may be used for drafting assistance and for copy-editing: proposing a first structure, tightening a paragraph, catching a spelling in American English that should be British. They are not a source. A sentence suggested by a tool is checked against the app and the test phones in exactly the same way as a sentence a person wrote, and every claim about what the product does, cannot do or needs is verified by a named person before the page is published.

No page is published without a human reading it start to finish. That reading is not a skim for errors; it is the whole page, in order, as a parent would read it, checking that every section says something true about the feature it belongs to and that nothing contradicts the product. If that reading finds a sentence nobody can stand behind, the sentence goes, whatever wrote it.

Images on the site are drawn, not photographed, and depict the product as it is. Phone screens, panel views and diagrams are rendered from the real interface’s layout and palette, with the demo family’s data filled in. We do not use stock photographs of children, AI-generated photographs of families, or screens showing features that do not exist. An image that shows a button the app does not have is treated as an error and corrected like a sentence.

• Allowed. Drafting help, rewording, copy-editing, checking for banned words and British spelling.
• Not allowed. Inventing a fact, a number, a quote or a feature; publishing anything unread; generating a photograph.
• Always. A named person owns the page and is the one who checked it.

Corrections

To send a correction, use the contact form and include the address of the page, the sentence you believe is wrong, and what you think is right. You do not need to be certain; a parent who noticed that a dialog on their Galaxy looked different from the one we describe is exactly the reader we want to hear from. Reports that bear on what the product can or cannot do are handled first.

What happens next is the same every time. A named person reads the report, reproduces the point on the test phones or in the panel, and decides. If the page is wrong, it is corrected, the Updated date in the byline changes to the day of the fix, and the person who sent the report receives a reply saying what changed. If we believe the page is right, the reply explains why and what we checked. If the question is one of judgement rather than fact, the reply says that too.

Corrections are not limited to mistakes. A page that is true but confusing is also wrong by this policy, and a report that says “I read this twice and still did not know which build to install” is treated the same way as a factual error: the page is rewritten until the question it failed to answer is answered in the first screen.

The Updated date on each page is the date the page last changed in any material way, not the date it was first published and not a date refreshed to look current. A page that has not changed keeps its old date, even when that date looks stale. When the product changes, the pages that describe the changed feature are reviewed and their dates move only once the text has.

The conflict of interest

We sell the app that these pages describe. There is no way round that, so the policy is to state it and to write in a way that makes it matter less. Every feature page says what the feature cannot do, in the same place and the same type size as what it can. Pages about social apps lead with the platform’s own safety settings before they mention our tracker, because for most families those settings do more. The FAQ answers “no” in the first sentence wherever no is the answer.

We never claim a feature we do not ship. The site does not describe planned features, beta features or features that exist in a competitor’s product but not in ours. It does not use phrases like “hidden mode” or “read their messages” to attract searches for things the product refuses to do; where those phrases appear, it is to say that the product will not do them. If a page tells you the app cannot do something, that is a product fact, not modesty.

Buying advice on this site is advice to buy from us, and you should read it that way. Where we think a different tool suits better, such as Apple’s Screen Time for a child with an iPhone or a platform’s own supervision feature, the page says so, and we count that as part of writing truthfully rather than as generosity.

Advertising on this site

The public website shows display ads. They pay for keeping long free guides online and they are the only advertising anywhere in what we make: the child app, the parent app and the parent panel carry none, because the product is paid for by parents’ subscriptions. The ads on this site are supplied by an ad network, which sees an ordinary website visit of the kind the privacy policy describes, including the cookies involved and how to opt out of personalised ads.

No ad network sees family data. The website and the product run separately; a parent signed in to the panel is not a page on this site, and nothing a child’s phone reports is available to any advertising system. There is no link between an ad shown on a guide and an account, a child or a phone, and we would not build one.

Ads never influence what a page says. No advertiser sees a page before it is published, suggests a topic, or is told when they are mentioned. Where a page describes another company’s product, it does so because a parent comparing tools needs it, and the description would be the same if that company were an advertiser or a rival. If you ever see an advert placed inside the body text as if it were a recommendation, treat it as a fault and tell us.