Xooloo's Parental Control App Puts the Focus on Time

News
By published

Instead of monitoring everything your kids do online, the Xooloo parental control app is more concerned about whether they're spending too much time in any one app.

Xooloo takes an unusual approach for a parental control application for their kids' mobile devices. When you first get started with app, Xooloo suggests you don't set up any parent controls at all.

MORE: Best Parental-Control and Cell Phone-Monitoring Apps

With that kind of data at their disposal, parents can then use apps to set up rules, which include daily quotas for how long their teen can use an app and what times of the day they're able to access particular apps. (Maybe no games until after dinner, for example.) On the version of Xooloo that runs on the teen's phone, there's a button for requesting extra time or access to blocked apps that the parents can grant or deny from their phone.

Parents will surely appreciate Xooloo's Dinner Time feature, which lets them specify a time to disable devices so everyone can have a tech-free meal together. The Dinner Time feature even sends out a push notification one minute before access gets cut-off, telling kids to wrap up what they're doing and come to dinner.

Xooloo lacks some of the other features found in other parental control apps, such as location tracking and logging calls and texts, but that's by design, Le Jan says. The app is really aimed more at helping kids manage their online time rather than letting parents monitor each and every aspect of their kids' digital lives.

While Xooloo charges a monthly fee, you get two months free if you pay for a full year. So that $2.99-a-month fee costs $30 for a full year's subscription. Xooloo also offers payment options for managing three devices ($4.99 a month or $50 annually) and an unlimited number ($6.99 a month or $60 annually).

The Android version of Xooloo's Digital Coach app for parents and teens launched last month. So did the parent app on iOS; a version for teens is coming soon for the iPhone, but it will have limited time-tracking capabilities because of limitations Apple places on third-party parental control apps.

Philip Michaels
Philip Michaels

Philip Michaels is a Managing Editor at Tom's Guide. He's been covering personal technology since 1999 and was in the building when Steve Jobs showed off the iPhone for the first time. He's been evaluating smartphones since that first iPhone debuted in 2007, and he's been following phone carriers and smartphone plans since 2015. He has strong opinions about Apple, the Oakland Athletics, old movies and proper butchery techniques. Follow him at @PhilipMichaels.