The guides are information, not advice
Every guide on this site is written by a named person, checked on a real phone where it describes something technical, and reviewed before it is published. We take care with them. Even so, a guide is general information for a general reader. It cannot know your child, your family, the country you live in, or the particular situation you are in tonight. It is not legal advice: the laws on monitoring, recording calls and children's privacy differ from place to place, and a guide that says something is "usually fine" is not telling you it is fine for you. It is not clinical or psychological advice: an article about screen time and sleep is not an assessment of your child, and nothing we publish should be used to decide whether a child needs professional help. If you are worried about a child's safety or wellbeing, the right person to talk to is a doctor, a school safeguarding lead, a helpline, or the police, depending on how urgent it is. A website is not any of those.
Guides also age. A method that worked on a phone in 2026 may not work on next year's Android, and a social app's settings page can be rearranged overnight. We date every guide and update the ones that matter most, but we cannot promise that any page is current on the day you read it.
The app depends on the phone
The child app runs on Android 9 and newer, and Android is not one thing. Each manufacturer changes it, each version changes it again, and the battery-saving features that ship on many phones will stop a background app from running unless they are told not to. We document what to switch off on the download page, but we cannot test every model, and a phone we have never seen may behave in a way we have not described. If the panel shows a device as offline or a permission as revoked, the phone has usually done something to the app rather than the other way round. The app also needs the permissions it asks for; if a child, a parent or an update revokes one, the matching category simply stops, and the panel will say so.
The two builds behave differently by design. The Google Play build omits the categories Google does not allow. The direct-download build adds them, and the sensitive ones among them also need a consent step accepted on the phone. A feature described on this site may therefore be absent from the build you installed, and that is not a fault.
Location is an estimate
A location fix comes from satellites, Wi-Fi networks and mobile masts, blended by the phone. Outdoors with a clear sky it is often within 10 metres; indoors, in a dense town centre or on a train it can be hundreds of metres out, and the panel draws an accuracy ring around the dot for exactly this reason. A dot at the edge of a saved Place can flip between "arrived" and "left" without the child moving. Location history is kept for 30 days, and gaps in it are normal: the phone was off, in a basement, in battery-saver mode, or the child had turned location off. A missed arrival alert means the phone did not report an arrival, which is not the same as the child not arriving. Never treat a single fix, or the absence of one, as proof of where someone is or is not.
Call recording is best effort
Call recording is available in the direct build, behind a consent switch, and it works on some phones and not on others. Many recent Android phones block it outright at the system level, and no app can get round that. Where it does work, it may capture only one side of the call, miss the first few seconds, or fail on calls made through a messaging app rather than the phone dialler. We describe it as best effort because that is what it is. If recording a particular call matters, do not rely on this feature for it, and check the law where you are before switching it on at all.
Monitoring is not the same as supervision
An app can tell you that a phone was at school at 09:10, that forty minutes of video were watched, that a message arrived from an unknown number. It cannot tell you whether your child is happy, whether the unknown number is a new friend from the football team or something to worry about, or whether forty minutes of video was a documentary for homework. The panel gives you facts to start a conversation with; it does not have the conversation for you. Keyword alerts are built from word lists, and word lists miss things and flag things wrongly in both directions. A quiet week in the panel is not a guarantee that nothing is wrong, and a busy one is not proof that something is. We built the app to be visible on the phone precisely so that it stays a tool a family uses together, not a replacement for a parent paying attention.
Other people's apps change
Much of what the app shows comes from the notifications other apps post: the sender and first line of a message from WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger, TikTok or Discord. Those companies change what their notifications contain whenever they like, and some let the user turn previews off. When that happens, the panel shows less, and there is nothing we can do about it except update our documentation. Encrypted chats are visible only as the notification lines Android displays, which is true of every monitoring product however it is described. Website filtering works on the phone and can be bypassed by a determined teenager with a different browser, a VPN or a friend's hotspot; the blocked-site log and the "apps installed outside Google Play" flag exist so that you notice, not so that it cannot happen.
Links to other sites
Guides link to outside sources where they help: a helpline, a government advice page, a manufacturer's support article, a piece of research. We check a link when we add it. We do not control those sites, we do not endorse everything on them, and we cannot promise that a page we linked to last year still says what it said then or exists at all. Adverts on guide pages are served by Google and link to advertisers we have no relationship with; an advert appearing beside a guide is not a recommendation from us.
Corrections are welcome
If a guide is wrong, out of date, or says something a phone does not actually do, we want to know, and we will fix it or take it down. Write to [email protected] with the page address and what you found; a screenshot helps. Corrections to a guide are noted at the bottom of that guide with the date. Questions about data or privacy go to [email protected]. Post can be sent to GuestSpy.
This disclaimer sits alongside the terms of use, which set out the legal limits on our liability in more formal words. Where the two differ, the terms govern.