Bark - Parental Controls

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

If you are monitoring an Android, I think this app would be great! Unfortunately I'm monitoring Apple products, and so it's almost useless. When it functions, it functions great, but you can pretty much count on it changing the device protection daily, so until I plug the devices back into the computer, they aren't getting analyzed, which is a super inconvenience. What's worse is I don't get notified they aren't connected and being analyzed until days later.

Interesting product. It seems to have the concept, but the app is unreliable. It does a good job of scanning the social media apps, and we get the alerts from TikTok, Snapchat, Spotify, YouTube, and others. The issue is it struggles to toggle between blocking an app and allowing the app. There's times when you want to block an app for the rest of the night, but it doesn't seem to work. It also seems to have issues monitoring the phone. I finally got a notification after 4 days.

Unusable lately because every time it tries to scan the phone it's supposed to be monitoring, it apparently takes a FULL backup of the phone, so it has eaten up almost 300GB of space on my computer. Deleted the files, made sure app was up to date, but it still happens. Had to stop monitoring as I could not find a setting to stop this behavior.

What's new

Fix scanning QR code sometimes hangs.