What’s the best way to restrict my Android devices to only use approved apps? I want to manage the whitelist remotely.
Bonus points if I can keep everything in-house, on my home server or similar via my existing VPN.
This is for my kids’ future phones. Ages 12 to 16.
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MDM - mobile device management, is the only way I know of.
By the way, installing Adguard (or something similar to cut out ads device-wise) helps to decrease the shit they are trying to install dramatically. Highly recommend. Family link works for me so far, though the kids are a bit younger.
Family Link. You can whitelist apps, get screen time stats, and if your kid needs an app, when they try install it it will ask your approval.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.kids.familylink
Bit of a pain getting the accounts setup, but otherwise works very well for preventing my grandma filling her tablet with junk.
Oo that looks neat. I’m wondering how I’ve missed it!
If there’s one thing I learned both as a kid and as a father, it’s that restricting kids’ access to computers - or anything really - just doesn’t work: software solutions that exist for that purpose are almost always defeated by kids, who are reliably more clever than the adults who try to restrict them, and only exist to falsely reassure their parents.
If you’re serious about controlling your children’s cellphones, I’d suggest buying them Linux phones, or phones that you can install a mobile Linux distro on: nobody makes Linux apps, so good luck getting malware or shitty social media apps on them. And of course, you can keep the root password to yourself and set up your kids as non-privileged users.
Either that or feature phones - if you truly hate your children.
Good suggestions but I’m not convinced that’s true.
It’s certainly possible to lock some Android devices down hard without rooting them. See Samsung Knox as an example. Even a pro will have a hard time getting around that.
I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy and to keep them from spur of the moment bad descisions with their clicks and time.
I trust my kids to mostly only use the devices how I say. The security is mainly to keep their mum happy
It sounds like you should simply trust your kids and convince your better half that she should do the same.
No, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a technical level of control over young kids devices in partnership with close supervision. It’s that or no phones until they’re 16.
