Bark Reviews

I cancelled our subscription simply for the fact that I was tired of all the technical issues. If I can't rely on it to work daily, I shouldn't be charged for it. The monitoring issues, I would just take my child's phone at least twice a week (depending on usage) and check through everything myself. We tried it for over a year before finally cancelling. Of the probably 14 months of use, 12 months had technical issues.

Beneficial in monitoring what your children are talking about both in text and searching for online. Watches carefully for common (and less common to adults) phrases or words that could potentially become a future problem. Easy to use. Can set a schedule so that only certain apps can be used at certain times. Has a school mode which blocks all social media apps installed on your child's phone until after school hours. Customer service is quick to respond to any issues you may have.

Alerts are an hour + delayed. TONS of technical issues. App on parent's phone kept removing itself, no matter what settings were changed. On child's phone, it kept deactivating itself. I trust my child to know that it wasn't anything she was doing. Some of the alerts were just silly and useless. Can't control the settings on alerts very well; its either all or nothing. Doesn't monitor social media apps like I was hoping. Also wasn't monitoring, or was missing, a lot of photos that should have been flagged. If it blocks a website, it only gives you the link to the website - doesn't tell you if it was a pop-up, or if your child actually tried to look at said website. My child chats on this AI app, and some of the messages she was receiving should have been flagged, in my opinion. But that falls back into the complaint that it doesn't monitor social media very well. I also have no idea what was viewed on TikTok while we tried bark. But looking at he personal history, or her showing me something that comes up as she's watching it, I know there were things that should not be viewed on a child's account. I'm not sure how much control bark can have over that, though. Its probably more of a setting with the app itself.