Reports and Phone Control using the Parent App

Control and manage your child's phone, directly from your own phone!

Using the MMGuardian Parent App, you will have full control over MMGuardian’s functions and monitoring capabilities, all from your own phone.

No more taking your child’s phone to check messages or make sure they’re not staying up all night!

Why Use The Parent App?

What exactly will you be able to control with your Parent App? Read the extensive list of features below.

Alternatively, parents can also access the controls via the secure web portal from a web browser such as Chrome or Safari.

Note: the functions available in the parent phone app depend on the type of device used by your child.

When your child has an Android phone or an MMGuardian Phone:

View all SMS text messages sent to or from the child phone, as well as messages exchanged using popular social media apps.
See detailed device usage reports for app usage, calls, and web browsing
Quickly locate your child’s phone, and see the location on a map
Lock or Unlock the child’s phone with a simple button press

Additionally, you can set and edit configurations for:

Screen Time Limits
Track (Scheduled Locate)
Contact Block (phone calls and SMS text messages)
App Control, and more

See the detailed descriptions below for more information!

If your child has an iPhone or iPad:

View all SMS text messages sent to or from the child phone, as well as messages exchanged using popular social media apps. Note: the sync app is also required, see: message reports from your child’s iPhone.
Create schedules for when downloaded apps, movies and TV shows will be disabled
Temporarily enable or disable downloaded apps
Configure Web Filter and view web browsing reports

Demonstration Mode

Want to see what MMGuardian is like before you sign up?

The Parent App includes a demonstration mode – no registration required. It will allow you to check out all of MMGuardian’s functions. You can see exactly how it will feel to use with your child.

Simply download the Parent App onto your phone and then tap the “Start Demo” button on the registration screen.

To exit Demo Mode, tap the red floating Demo Options button, then select Exit Demo.

FUNCTIONS WHEN CHILD HAS AN ANDROID OR MMGUARDIAN PHONE

Detailed Usage Reports

MMGuardian provides detailed reports of your child’s SMS text messages, chat messages from social media and messaging apps, app usage, calls, and web browsing. These can all be viewed in the Phone Usage screen in the MMGuardian Parent App.  

In order to reduce battery and data usage, reports are only automatically sent once per day. However, reports from the child’s phone with current usage can be requested at any time of the day. To view usage from previous days in the Parent App, just swipe to the right on the Device Usage screen, or use the left-right arrows at the top of the screen.

SMS Text Messages

View all SMS text messages sent to and from the child phone in addition to messages sent in select social media apps. Click here to view the full list of monitored apps (the MMGuardian Phone is an Android).

Tap on the contact name to view conversations.

If you don’t want to view your child’s texts, you can disable that option. Select the 3-dots menu at the top, right corner of the Device Usage screen of the Parent App.

Detailed Text Message View

Messages with either all or a specific contact for the day can be viewed

App Usage

See what apps were used, for how long, and at what point in the day.

This is helpful for knowing if your child is using particular apps for too long or at inappropriate times. If necessary, you can restrict app usage using the App Control function.

Call History

Know who your child is having phone conversations with, who initiated the calls, and at what time the calls occurred.

If you don’t want to view your child’s call history, you can disable that option in the top, right corner of the Device Usage screen.

If desired, you can restrict calls using the Contact Block function.

Web Browsing

View all of your child’s browsing history, how long they were browsing, and at what point in the day. Compatible with most browsers.

In order to block websites, enable the Web Filter function. You can set limits on the types of websites your child can visit

Safety Alerts & Text Monitor

In case you don’t feel like reading every single one of your child’s text messages, MMGuardian provides Safety Alerts that will let you know if there is something concerning you need to check. Categories include bullying, drugs, suicide and online predators/grooming. See how MMGuardian’s alerts have helped parents protect their kids (and even saved lives) by clicking here.

Safety Alerts can also be generated based on your child’s browsing, but this extra function requires that Web Filter be enabled.

A simple Text Monitor function based on your own custom keywords is also available.

Safety Alerts

The settings for Safety Alerts can be found in the Alert Settings section of the Parent App where you can enable or disable the Safety Alert categories such as Bullying, Suicide, and Drugs (and you can find many other types of alerts to enable/disable). All SMS texts will be scanned and if MMGuardian’s AI detects a potential issue related to one of the enabled categories, you will be sent an alert and able to see the text that generated the alert.

MMGuardian has teamed up with CyberTipline in order to help catch predators. If receiving a Predator Alert, parents will have the opportunity to report that alert. The MMGuardian team forwards the information to CyberTipline who will contact the relevant authorities (including internationally) to catch the predator.

Text Monitor Alerts

The Text Monitor section in the left menu of the Parent App allows you to enter your own keywords separated by commas. These are not case-sensitive. If any of the keywords are detected in your child’s monitored messages, an alert will be sent to you in your Parent App, so that you can view the relevant message.

Note: texts to/from parent admin numbers will never generate alerts (so you cannot test the alerts with your own phone number!).

The two features of Safety Alerts and Text Monitor combine to give parents peace of mind knowing that MMGuardian is looking out for their child, without the parent having to spend time constantly surveilling their child.

Inappropriate Picture Detection

With the increasing popularity of sending, receiving, and requesting nude pictures, MMGuardian’s Inappropriate Picture Detection is another tool available to parents to help protect their children. Pictures exchanged via MMS messages or saved on the child’s phone are scanned by AI in the app on the on-child’s phone.

If any images are deemed to be adult or potential selfies, a copy of the picture will be stored in the MMGuardian app on the child’s phone, and parents will be alerted in their Parent App.

To view the pictures, parent’s just log into the MMGuardian child app on their child’s phone, and they will be guided to the saved pictures.

By using an on-device AI engine and saving the pictures on the child’s phone, and not online in any databases, MMGuardian offers maximum privacy and security for children. This is also the reason why pictures are not reported or sent to the Parent App, protecting all parties from any potential legal liabilities involved with the transmission of child pornography.

App Control

The App Control function offers parents the ability to completely control their child’s app use.

When first entering App Control in your Parent app, you will see a list of the apps that are currently installed on the child’s phone.

By tapping the green check by the app’s name, you can block the app (causing a red circle with a line through it to appear), preventing the child from accessing the app without the admin password. This is ideal if you want to restrict your child from using popular and potentially harmful apps like Snapchat or TikTok.   

At the bottom of the list of apps, you will find the option to automatically block all newly-installed apps on the child’s phone. While this won’t block the child from installing apps, it will prevent the child from using any apps they do install until the parent manually unblocks them. Since apps can be downloaded from many different sources, this is much more secure than simply blocking Google Play as other parental control apps tend to do (although you do have that option as well).

If you wish to set limits or schedules for app use, go to the Limits tab at the top, where you will be able to create groups of apps and assign usage limits.

For each group, you can assign: 

Daily Limits – Once the daily limit has been reached through cumulative usage of the apps in the group, all of the apps will then be blocked.

App Block Schedules – Blocks the apps in the group at specific days and times. This is useful if you want to block your child from being unproductive without completely locking the phone, such as when they’re doing homework. To learn about locking the phone completely, please see the Time Limits section below.

Apps are then added to a group, noting that a specific app can only be added to one group, but you can have more than one group. In this way, different limits can be assigned to games, social media or other ‘groups’ of apps.

Time Limits & Lock Unlock

In the Time Limits and Lock Unlock section of your parent app, you can lock the phone completely, preventing your child from using it for anything other than emergencies or to contact parents/admins.

The Lock Unlock screen allows you to manually lock or unlock the child phone on demand for set periods of time such as 2 hours.

The Time Limits screen allows you to set schedules with specific times and days for when you want the phone to be locked such as overnight on weekdays.

Web Filter

Enable the Web Filter if you want to block your child from accessing inappropriate websites in web browsers. Once enabled, the MMGuardian Browser will appear on your child’s phone, but you can apply the web filter to other browsers on your child’s phone by tapping the “CHANGE” button in the Web Filter screen.   

How does the Web Filter decide which sites should and should not be blocked?

All websites are automatically categorized into at least one category. In the Web Filter section, you can select a child age range which will block suggested website categories, but if you would like to customize what specific categories are blocked or allowed, you can do so.   

There is also a URL Override option which will allow you to enter a specific URL to always be blocked or allowed regardless of other category settings. This feature is useful if you want to block a particular website like youtube.com as a punishment or allow only one website out of a category (for example, allowing Facebook but blocking all other social media sites). 

Location & Track Location

MMGuardian allows you to locate your child either on demand or according to schedules, so you never have to worry about not knowing where they are. In the Location section of the Parent App, you can quickly get your child’s current location on demand, and also view their location history.

There is also a function called Track (Location). This screen will allow you to create a schedule with set days and times for the location of the child’s phone to be automatically retrieved. For example, if you wanted to make sure your child’s phone was being tracked whenever they were traveling to and from school, you could set a schedule that would track their location every 30 minutes from 7am – 9am and from 3pm – 5pm on weekdays. 

Contact Block

Contact Block allows you to prevent your child from being in contact with anyone that you do not approve of such as bullies, predators, and strangers by blocking phone calls and SMS text messages.

Contact Block can be used in either of two modes:

Allow – This will only allow contact with users included in the list of allowed contacts. All others will be blocked.

Block – This will block contact to or from any users on the list of blocked contacts.

Note: Blocking of SMS text messages requires that the MMGuardian Messaging app (included as part of the main child phone app downloaded from Google Play) is used.

Installation and Use

Download the parent phone app from the relevant app store. Scan the QR code below using the camera on your (parent’s) phone to be taken to the correct app for your phone.

If you have already registered your child’s device, use the same email address when registering the parent phone app.

Both your phone and your child’s device need to have network data capability, as the apps use data (WiFi or mobile data) to communicate with each other.

Licensing
The Parent App does not itself need to be licenced, and is free to download and use. You may purchase subscriptions from within the Parent App, that can be applied to licence the MMGuardian app installed on your child’s device.

After the free 14 day trial period of the app on the child’s device, unless the child device app is licenced, usage reports and the parts of the Parent App that relate to Premium functions on the child’s app are disabled.

If your child has an MMGuardian Phone, the subscription to license the parental control functions can only be set up at the parent web portal (https://family.mmguardian.com) or when purchasing the phone.