Bark - Parental Controls

Bark Technologies, Inc.

In-app purchases

About this app

Bark provides families with the tools they need to raise kids in the digital age. Our comprehensive service lets you monitor content, manage screen time, and filter websites so you can get peace of mind while your child is online.

CONTENT MONITORING

Bark monitors your child’s text messages, email, YouTube, and 30+ apps and social media platforms for issues like cyberbullying, suicidal ideation, adult content, sexual predators, profanity, threats of violence, and more. Parents receive alerts only when something potentially problematic occurs online. You won’t have full access to everything on your child’s phone — just the things you might need to know about.

SCREEN TIME MANAGEMENT

Families can set healthy time limits and create schedules for when their children’s devices can connect to the internet (through both cell service and Wi-Fi).

WEB FILTERING

Our web filter lets you select which websites your child can access on their devices. You can allow or block specific sites — or even whole categories like streaming services, online gaming, sexual content, and more.

BARK HOME

When you purchase Bark Home, a small device sold separately that connects to your Wi-Fi router, you can use our app to manage screen time and filter websites and apps on all of the Wi-Fi-connected devices in your home, from smart TVs and video game consoles to laptops and tablets. Bark Home requires an active Bark subscription.

PRICING

Bark, our comprehensive online safety solution, includes content monitoring, screen time management, and web filtering. Bark is $14/month — or $99 annually.

Bark Jr provides screen time management and web filtering for $5/month or $49 annually.

SETTING UP BARK

After you download the Bark app for parents and guardians, you’ll need to download the Bark for Kids app to your child’s device to enable monitoring, screen time management, and more. Visit www.bark.us/android to install it.

Ratings and reviews

*It's an Android phone. Needs a lot of work. Disconnects from monitoring devices often and if they don't keep the app/notification open on their phone, you can't track their location. Major flaw. This is causing me to switch to Life360 for safety. Final straw, they don't monitor the Discord app on computers. Major safety issue. I'm finding something else.

***edit in response to Bark.*** We've tried working with support multiple times. It's never a long term solution. ***** The app does well at picking up some SMS concerns, but outside of that, it's garbage. More often than not, my child's phone won't connect to anything, Wi-Fi or not. If we disable the Bark VPN, everything works fine again. Multiple times a day, it blocks all data when on Wi-Fi, but if we wait two minutes, it works again. It is very frustrating and time-consuming.

Overall this is a very good app! The only thing that I am disappointed with is since the most recent update, satellite views are no longer available when it comes to tracking your child. Unfortunately, the update makes it a little more difficult to pinpoint exact locations and gives a more general area of location. I preferred the satellite view and the tracking before the update.