Bark - Monitor and Manage Your

Bark Technologies, Inc.

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

A very good solution, but it gives dozens of alerts for the same thing daily (out of room for analysis) and you have to open each one to manually delete them. This crowds out other alerts and for someone who wants the inbox to be at zero and only review new alerts it is very frustrating. If there is a way to bulk delete it isn't intuitive. This should be fixed to make it a really good app.

The app worked well for about a year. Since then, the VPN feature, which is required to make the app work, has turned my child's phone Samsung Galaxy S7 into a brick. They can't do anything with the VPN on. Hence, the app is useless because they have to turn the VPN off in order to actually use the phone, it's features, or apps. Also, the apps keep disconnecting. That then requires 15-20 minutes reconnecting/ diagnosing. Sadly, we're going to find another option.

Nice when it worked, but I haven't been able to actually use it in over a year despite continuously paying for the subscription. Why? Because all it takes to break the connection is your child turning on battery optimization or changing other basic general phone settings and then it won't reconnect until you go onto their phone and reconnect everything. It is literally useless if your child knows how to change their phone's settings.

What's new

General bug fixes.