Parental Control Features
Fifteen features, all free, all visible on your child's phone. This page explains each one the way we would explain it across a kitchen table: what it actually collects, which Android permission it depends on, which build of the app it needs, and where its limits are. The detail pages go deeper; this is the map.
Every feature, its build and the permission it depends on.
Eight features work from the Google Play build, including everything most families rely on day to day. Seven need the direct-download build, because Google Play does not permit SMS, call-log, contacts or media access for this category of app. The permission column is the one that predicts problems.
| Feature | What it does | Build | Permission it needs | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| GPS location tracker | Live map, location history trail, geofence alerts on saved places. | Either | Location — “Allow all the time” | Free |
| Wi-Fi tracker | Which networks the phone joins and when. Corroborates the map indoors. | Either | Location | Free |
| Screen time app | Daily budgets, bedtime and school windows, per-app time limits. | Either | Usage access | Free |
| App blocker | Every app set to allowed, limited or blocked. Approval for new installs. | Either | Usage access | Free |
| Website blocker & web filter | Category blocking, Safe Search enforcement, unknown browsers stopped. | Either | Accessibility service | Free |
| Browsing history tracker | Sites visited with time, category and what the filter stopped. | Either | Accessibility service | Free |
| Social media monitoring | Counts, senders, timing and keyword alerts across messaging apps. | Either | Notification access | Free |
| Chores & screen time rewards | Children earn minutes by finishing tasks you set. | Either | None | Free |
| SMS tracker | Who they text and when. Message content is a separate, deliberate switch. | Direct only | SMS | Free |
| Call tracker | Call logs with names, direction, duration and timestamps. | Direct only | Call log | Free |
| Contacts monitoring | Who is saved on the phone, and alerts when someone new is added. | Direct only | Contacts | Free |
| Flagged photos | Flags the few images worth a look. Does not copy the gallery. | Direct only | Storage | Free |
| Video index | An index of clips saved on the phone, with capture time and size. | Direct only | Storage | Free |
| Remote camera | One still on request. Announced on the phone every time. | Direct only | Camera | Free |
| Ambient voice recording | A short clip on request. Announced on the phone every time. | Direct only | Microphone | Free |
“Either” means the Play build does it
Location, Wi-Fi history, screen time, the app blocker, the web filter, browsing history, social alerts and rewards all work from the Play Store version.
“Direct only” is Google's rule
Call, text, contact and media access are not allowed for this category on Google Play, so the Play build ships without that code entirely. The direct build adds it.
Free means free
No card, no trial clock, no feature held back behind a plan. The free parental control pricing page explains how that is paid for.
The features almost every family ends up living in.
Location, screen time, app control and the web filter carry nearly all the weight for most households. If you switch on nothing else, switch on these, and switch them on one at a time.
GPS location tracker & family locator
Every paired phone is a pin on one family map, tagged with its battery level and the last time it reported. The location history draws the day as a trail, so a detour is obvious and a normal afternoon looks boring. Save the places that matter, such as home, school or a grandparent's house, and a geofence alert arrives the moment a child gets there or leaves.
Accuracy is what Android gives us: usually a few metres outdoors with clear sky, and noticeably worse indoors, in a basement or in a dense city, where the Wi-Fi tracker fills in the gaps. Reporting continues in the background only when the location permission is set to “Allow all the time”. “While using the app” looks granted and collects nothing once the app is closed, and it is the single most common reason a family map goes stale.
- Arrivals and departures, not every step. Alerts fire for the places you save, so the panel stays quiet on a normal day.
- A trail you can scroll. Each stop shows when the phone got there and how long it stayed.
- Device health watches the permission. If location drops after a system update, the panel says which setting changed.
Screen time limits & app time limits
A newly paired child has no screen time limit at all. Nothing is blocked until you decide it should be, which is the opposite of most parental control software, where restrictions arrive switched on and you spend the first evening turning them back off. When you are ready, set a daily budget for weekdays and a longer one for weekends, draw a bedtime and a school schedule, and put a limit on the one app that eats the evening.
When they hit the limit they can ask for more from their own phone. The request lands in your panel with their note attached and you tap 15 min, 30 min or No. The extra time reaches the phone within seconds. The alarm, the torch and any apps you mark as always allowed keep working during bedtime, so the phone is still a phone.
- Per-app totals, not a transcript. You see how long YouTube was open, not what was watched.
- Schedules stack. A school window, a bedtime and a daily budget can all apply on the same day.
- Requests are logged. A week of “yes” and “no” decisions is visible to both of you.
App blocker & new-app approval
Every app on the phone is set to one of three states: allowed, limited or blocked. Allowed apps always work. Limited apps get a daily time budget of their own and stop when it runs out. Blocked apps do not open, and the child sees a plain message saying so rather than a crash.
The part families use most is the approval step for new installs. When a new app appears on the phone, it waits for your decision. You see the name and the store category, and you tap Allow, Limit or Block from wherever you are. It is the difference between finding out about a new game on the day it was installed and finding out about it from the bill.
- Three states, one screen. Filter the list by allowed, limited, blocked or new.
- Agreed-until dates. Block an app until a birthday and the panel remembers why.
- System apps are protected. Phone, messages, camera and settings cannot be blocked by accident.
Website blocker & web filter
Block whole categories with one switch each: adult content, gambling, violence and weapons, and a handful of others. Force Safe Search on Google, Bing and YouTube so a search does not become a loophole. The filter reads the address bar in the browsers you allow, which means it works on the sites your child actually visits rather than a list someone made up years ago.
The detail that makes it a real filter is what it does with browsers you did not allow. A web filter that only covers Chrome is a filter in name only, because the first workaround any twelve-year-old finds is a different browser. FreeSpy stops unknown browsers from opening, logs the attempt, and leaves the conversation to you.
- A log of what was stopped. Category, browser and time, so you can see attempts without reading over a shoulder.
- Allow-list a site. One exception for the homework portal that a category rule catches by mistake.
- No keystrokes. The accessibility service sees the URL bar, not what is typed elsewhere.
The features that tell you when something deserves a conversation.
These work from what the phone already shows, such as notifications, browser history and Wi-Fi networks, and turn it into a short list of things worth your attention. They are designed to be glanced at, not studied.
Social media monitoring & keyword alerts
WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, Messenger, Viber, Kik and TikTok are monitored through Android's notification access. That gives you message counts per app, who is sending them and when, and an alert when a notification matches a word or phrase on your list or comes from someone not saved in their contacts. It is enough to notice a new name appearing at midnight, or a phrase you told the panel to watch for.
It is not a transcript, and we will not pretend otherwise. End-to-end encrypted messages cannot be read by any app on the market, this one included. What every monitoring product sees is what the app chooses to show as a notification. Each social app's own page on this site says exactly where that line falls for that app.
- Your keyword list. Start from a suggested set and add the words that matter in your house.
- Unknown senders flagged. A message from an account not in their contacts is marked as such.
- Counts and timing. Enough to see a pattern change without reading a single message.
Chores & screen time rewards
Set a task, attach a number of minutes, and let your child earn them. They mark the chore done from their phone, optionally with a photo, and the request appears in your panel for a tap of approval. The minutes are added on top of the day's budget, so a Saturday morning of jobs can turn into a longer Saturday afternoon of games without anyone renegotiating the rules.
Streak tasks, such as feeding the cat every day for a week, pay out at the end of the streak. One-off tasks pay out on approval. Nothing is deducted for a task that is not done; rewards are a carrot, and the budget is the budget.
How chores and rewards work
Browsing history tracker
Sites visited in the browsers you allow, with the time, the category the filter assigned and whether anything was stopped. Most parents open this once, see a list of homework sites and video sites, and never open it again. That is the correct outcome.
It is most useful in the week after a filter change, when you want to know whether a category rule is catching something it should not. The browsing history page shows what the log looks like on a good day and a bad one.
Wi-Fi tracker
Which Wi-Fi networks the phone joins and when. On its own it is a footnote. Next to the map it is corroboration: a phone that says it is at school and is connected to the school's network is at school, even in a building where GPS drifts across the street.
It also explains gaps. A phone that reported nothing for two hours and then joined a network called “Nan's Wi-Fi” was probably at Nan's, in a room with no signal. Details are on the Wi-Fi tracker page.
Contacts monitoring
The list of people saved on the phone, and an alert when someone new is added. This is the quiet feature that makes the others readable: a call log with names in it is a story, and a call log of numbers is a puzzle.
New-contact alerts matter most for a younger teenager, where a name you have never heard, added at 23:40, is exactly the kind of thing you want to ask about in the morning. The contacts page has the details.
Call and text logs, for the pattern rather than the content.
Google Play does not allow this category of app to touch SMS or the call log, so these live in the build downloaded from our site. They are most useful for who is in touch and how often, and they work best when you never open a message body at all.
Call tracker & SMS tracker
The call log records who called, who was called, the direction, the duration and the time, with names pulled from the phone's contacts. Missed calls from numbers that are not saved are marked, because those are the ones worth a second look. The text log records the same for SMS: counts per contact, direction and timing, in a weekly view that makes a change in pattern visible at a glance.
Reading the content of text messages is a separate, deliberate switch in your panel. It is off by default, it stays off until you turn it on, and the child's “What's shared” screen changes the moment you do. We built it that way because the pattern of who is in touch answers most questions, and because a parent who reads everything usually ends up knowing less, not more. The SMS tracker and call tracker pages describe what each log looks like and where the switch lives.
- Names, not numbers. Contacts are matched automatically, and unknown numbers are flagged.
- Weekly counts per contact. Thirty-eight texts to one friend is normal. Thirty-eight to a number you do not recognise is a question.
- Content off by default. A separate switch, shown on the child's phone when it is on.
Media and on-request tools. Most families never open them.
These exist for a missing child, a grooming concern or a safeguarding case, not for a Tuesday. They are permission-gated, announced on the phone every time they run, and we would rather you left them alone. A parent reaching for them weekly has a problem that a feature will not solve.
Flagged photos & the video index
The photo tool does not copy the gallery. It looks at new images on the phone and flags the few that are worth a look, such as a screenshot containing a phone number or an image that appears to be an identity document, and shows you those. Two out of two hundred is a typical week. The rest are never uploaded and never seen by anyone.
The video tool is an index, not a copy: the clips saved on the phone, with their capture time, length and size, and which app saved them. It answers “is there a two-minute video from last night” without moving the video anywhere. The flagged photos and video index pages explain the flagging rules and their false-positive rate honestly.
Remote camera & ambient voice recording
One still photo on request, or one thirty-second audio clip on request. Both are announced on the child's phone before and after, with a visible notice and a sound, and both are listed in the history on the child's own screen. There is no silent mode and there never will be, because a tool that can watch a child in secret is a tool that can watch anyone in secret.
We keep them because there are days when a parent needs to know that a child is safe and the phone is the only thing that can answer. The remote camera and ambient voice recording pages set out what the announcement looks like and how the history works.
Two builds of one app, and the difference is Google's policy rather than ours.
Google Play does not permit apps in this category to access SMS, the call log, contacts or the media library, so the Play build ships without that code entirely. The direct-download build, installed from this site, adds it. Everything else is identical.
Start with the Play build if you are unsure
It covers location, screen time, the app blocker, the web filter, browsing history, social alerts, Wi-Fi history and rewards, which is everything most families use every day. You can switch to the direct build later without losing a single setting, and by then you will know whether you actually want the logs.
Installing the direct build safely
Only ever download it from this site, never from a third-party store or a forum. Android asks once to allow installs from your browser for this one file; you can switch that permission off again afterwards. The build is signed, and the app on the phone shows the version it is running. The setup guide walks through the prompt with a screenshot.
Judge a parental control app by what it asks for, not by what it promises.
The feature list tells you what an app claims. The permission list tells you what it can do. FreeSpy asks for six things in the Play build and three more in the direct build, and each one maps to a feature you can see in the panel. There is no permission for reading keystrokes, because there is no keylogger.
Location, “Allow all the time”
CriticalPowers the map, the trail and geofence alerts. Android offers “While using the app”, which looks granted and collects nothing from a pocket. Only “Allow all the time” keeps reporting alive in the background. If the map ever goes stale, this is the first thing to check, because system updates and accidental taps sometimes flip it back.
Usage access
Lets the app count how long each app is in the foreground. It powers screen time totals, per-app limits and the app blocker. It does not see what happens inside an app, only that the app was open and for how long.
Notification access
Lets the app read the notifications other apps post, which is where social media monitoring and keyword alerts come from. It sees the sender and preview text that the messaging app itself chose to show. It cannot see inside an encrypted conversation.
Accessibility service
Lets the app see the address bar in the browsers you allow, so the web filter can block categories, force Safe Search and log the sites visited. It is also what stops an unknown browser from opening. It does not read what is typed in other apps.
Ignore battery optimisation
Android aggressively kills background apps to save power, and on some phones it is enough to stop reporting overnight. This exemption keeps the app alive. The cost is small, typically a few percent of battery a day, and the panel shows the phone's battery level so you can judge for yourself.
SMS, call log and contacts
Direct onlyPower the text log, the call log and contacts monitoring in the direct-download build. Reading message content is a separate switch in your panel that stays off until you turn it on, and the child's “What's shared” screen changes when you do.
Almost every “it stopped working” report traces back to a permission. Revoked by a system update, reset by a battery-saver mode, or never granted properly on the day. Your panel's Device health page lists each one and says which changed, so you fix the setting rather than reinstalling the app.
No stealth mode. No keylogger. No silent camera.
Every product in this category is defined by what it will not do, and ours is secrecy. FreeSpy sits in the app drawer with its own name and icon. A screen inside it lists everything being collected. The camera and microphone announce themselves on the child's screen every single time. There is no disguised package name and no way to run it without the person holding the phone knowing.
That is a real cost. A determined teenager can uninstall it, and when they do, your panel tells you rather than hiding the failure. We think a tool that survives being discovered is worth more than one that works only until it is found, because a child who finds a hidden tracker learns two things, and neither of them helps you.
There is no keystroke logger either. A keylogger captures passwords, private notes and every half-typed message, most of it from apps you were never trying to monitor, and it collects far more about other people than about your child. The keylogger page sets out the reasoning in full, and the about us page lists the rest of what we turned down.
Fifteen features is a list, not a recommendation. Here is the recommendation.
A list this long invites you to switch everything on, and that is the wrong instinct. In practice families live in three or four features, and which ones depends on the child's age more than anything else. Start small, and add a feature only when you can say what question it answers.
Limits and the filter carry nearly all the weight.
You already know where they are. Most of their messaging is with you. What matters is that the phone goes to sleep at night and that a search does not lead somewhere it should not.
- Daily budget and bedtime
- Web filter with Safe Search
- New-app approval
- Chores and rewards, if you like
Where they are and who is messaging them start to matter more.
The map and geofences earn their keep. Keyword alerts across social apps become the feature you are glad you set up. Screen time becomes a negotiation, and the request button is what keeps it civil.
- Location with school and home geofences
- Social alerts with a keyword list
- App blocker with approval for new installs
- Budget, bedtime and per-app limits
Often, the honest answer is less.
A location share they have agreed to, an alert on unknown contacts and a bedtime schedule are usually the whole set-up. Loosening a limit on a visible app is a milestone worth marking.
- Location, agreed and visible
- Unknown-sender and new-contact alerts
- Bedtime on school nights
- Everything else off
Questions parents ask about these features.
Can FreeSpy read WhatsApp, Snapchat or Instagram messages?
It sees what those apps show as Android notifications: the sender, the timing and usually a preview. That is enough for counts, unknown-sender alerts and keyword matches. It is not a transcript. End-to-end encrypted conversations cannot be read by any app on the market, and each social app's page on this site says exactly where the line falls for that app.
Does it work on iPhone?
The monitored phone must be Android 8.0 or later. Your own parent panel is a web page, so you can check in from an iPhone, a Mac or a work computer. If the child's phone is an iPhone, Apple's Screen Time is the right tool and one of our guides explains it properly.
Will it drain the battery?
Typically a few percent a day, mostly from location reporting. The panel shows each phone's battery level and last-seen time, so you can see the cost for yourself. The battery-optimisation exemption is what keeps reporting alive overnight; without it, some phones stop reporting when the screen has been off for a while.
Can my child tell when I look at the panel?
Their phone shows that a parent viewed the panel today. It does not show which screens you opened or how long you spent. We built it that way because a child who knows you looked, and knows what could be seen, has no reason to hunt for what else might be hidden.
What happens when a permission is removed?
The feature that depends on it stops, and your panel's Device health page says which one. FreeSpy does not force permissions back on or hide from uninstallation. It tells you, so the conversation happens the same day rather than weeks later.
Can both parents use the same family?
Yes. Invite a co-parent from Family access in your panel. Both of you see the same children and the same alerts, and every command is stamped with the name of whoever sent it, so a 30-minute approval never becomes a mystery.
Is there really no paid plan?
There is no subscription and no card. Every feature on this page is free. The advanced tools at the bottom of the list, and extra days of access to them, are unlocked by completing small optional tasks rather than paying. If you never complete a task, the everyday features keep working exactly as they are.
How is this different from Google's Family Link?
Family Link is free, made by Google, and for a younger child it may be all you need; several of our guides say so. FreeSpy adds a live family map with geofences and history, a request-based approach to screen time, keyword alerts across messaging apps, and call and text logs, none of which Family Link provides. The guides compare the two honestly.
Every parental control feature, free.
Create a free account and pair your child's Android phone in about ten minutes, or open the read-only demo first and click through every feature on this page.
Android · Free to set up · Visible on your child's phone