KidsGuard Pro Review – Keeping a Check on the Kids
Reviews • May. 28, 2022
In this day and age of rampant cyberbullying and internet criminal activities, KidsGuard Pro by ClevGuard hopes to offer some control to parents. But does KidsGuard live up to the promise of being a dependable solution for parental control and monitoring on iOS and Android? We’re here to find out with a detailed review of the KidsGuard Pro app.
The age of the World Wide Web has dawned upon us, keeping families, communities, and businesses more connected than ever before. Gone are the days when having an internet connection was considered a luxury, with even the UN considering the internet as a basic human right. The limitless capabilities of the internet has connected remote regions of the world to mainstream education, social media, and entertainment spheres.
For most urban homes, it is more difficult to keep the young ones off the internet, since it has become an inseparable part of our daily lives. A concerning statistic reveals that kids in the USA, especially those in the teenage bracket, spend a whopping 9 hours a day staring down at screens. Even if most of these hours are spent judiciously attending school online, the very nature of the internet puts the young ones at risk.
The increased number of young internet users has directly led to a rapid growth in online bullying, unsolicited pornographic content, and other harmful online activities. Considering how frequently we use our mobile devices to access the web, makes it a portable portal to a world of unwarranted social connections and media content that may be harmful to the wellbeing of your child.
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Enter – KidsGuard Pro
Considering the fact that more than half the children in the United States own a smartphone by the age of 11, the urgent need for a parental control platform is a no-brainer. However, with the iOS of iPhone and Android OS run by several hundreds of manufacturers, finding a universal parental control solution has been a tedious job.
KidsGuard Pro has been developed for the very purpose of simplifying parental controls across all mobile platforms. ClevGuard – the team behind this web-based parental control software, has been long associated with delivering state of the art internet security solutions. Their latest offering bring a whole new dimension to protective monitoring and parental care, which has compelled us to take a look and review some of its most popular features.
How to configure KidsGuard Pro
Now you get the basic idea of KidsGuard Pro, here’s our experience setting things up. Generally speaking, the installation experience does require some simple tinkering to do, but even for a parent who isn’t tech savvy, the process is made easier with the assistance that ClevGuard offers at every step of the way.
Setting up KidsGuard Pro for Android
You start it all off by creating a new KidsGuard Pro account from the official website here. Its as simple as picking a username and password, signing up for the account, and selecting the subscription you need. In general, you can choose KidsGuard Pro for Android and continue to the payment page.
Once you have made the payment and activated your KidsGuard Pro membership, it is time to install the app on the target device. Get a hold of your child’s Android or iOS device and open the web browser to access the KidsGuard Pro setup wizard.
After launching the ClevGuard website on the phone web browser, download and install the app. Follow the on-screen instructions to download and install the .APK file on your kids’ Android phone. You might need to enable Unknown Sources first by pressing the Settings button on the pop-up window.
Launch the KidsGuard Pro app and enter your login credentials that you used to make the purchase. Enter the required information, such as the child’s name and age, and use the on-screen instructions to disable Google Play Protect and grant the app all the required permissions.
Note: The KidsGuard Pro app on Android requires a ton of permissions to allow all of the parental monitoring features to work. This includes some critical ones such as app usage access, accessibility permissions, disabling battery optimizations, screen recording permissions, and more.
After you have granted all of the required permissions to the app, it will ask you to Start Monitoring your target device. Once you press the button, the app icon will be hidden from the app drawer, and the app will silently work in the background.
After you’ve set everything up on the target Android device, head over to the ClevGuard panel to remotely monitor and control the device. The Dashboard gives you more than a dozen tools, with location tracking, parental monitoring, a complete view of call logs, messages, app data, and so much more available in the Sidebar on the left.
Setting up KidsGuard Pro for iOS
You start it all off by creating a new KidsGuard Pro account from the official website here. Its as simple as picking a username and password, signing up for the account, and selecting the subscription you need. In general, you can choose KidsGuard Pro for iOS from the list.
Similarly, you can also select KidsGuard Pro for iCloud that is a wireless parental monitoring solution, but offers fewer features. Hence, to garner complete details of your child’s iPhone usage activities, we recommend trying out KidsGuard Pro for iOS instead.
After you’ve signed up, download the KidsGuard Pro for iOS either for Windows or for macOS. It is recommended to install the app on the family computer or your child’s computer, whichever is often used to sync the iOS device with the system. If you don’t have it installed already, KidsGuard Pro for iOS will ask you to install the latest version of iTunes to the computer system.
KidsGuard Pro will run an automatic sync on the system todetect iOS backup files from iTunes, highlighting the device name, date of backup, and device serial number. If there isn’t a backup file on the system, you can even connect your child’s iPhone or iPad to the computer using a USB cable to access the data.
Note: You will need to unlock the iOS device and allow it to ‘Trust this Computer‘ if it is the first time you are connecting the device to your computer.
The app will now begin to scan the data on the target device, and depending on the data size, it will take a few minutes. Finally, all of the information will be available on the Dashboard giving you a brief view of everything stored on the system. On the left Sidebar, you have an entire list of content that can be viewed, such as the call logs, iMessages, WhatsApp chats and media, photos and videos etc.
How does KidsGuard Pro work?
The idea behind KidsGuard Pro is to offer a simple and stealthy solution to monitoring the usage activities on your child’s smartphone. It all starts off by signing up for the service and installing the KidsGuard Pro app on the child’s mobile device, which runs in the background silently for tracking and monitoring the data.
Call logging & SMS monitoring
Keeping a check on the incoming and outgoing call logs on your kids’ phone is made possible with a dedicated Call Logs and Messages section of the KidsGuard Pro Dashboard. The Calls Logs section gives you a peek into the type of calls (incoming, outgoing, and missed calls), along with the duration of these phone calls, all of which can be sorted date wise.
The Messages section allows you to monitor the SMS that go in and out of the smartphone, along with iMessage support for iOS devices. Apart from labeling the conversations with the contacts, you get a detailed view of the conversations, along with timestamps right below the message bubbles.
Social media parental control
A key area where KidsGuard Pro blows the competition out of the water is its ability to widely monitor all of the popular social media apps. Apart from covering the basics such as WhatsApp, KidsGuard Pro goes above and beyond with parental monitoring over Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat, and QQ on iOS and iPadOS devices.
However, if your child uses an Android mobile phone, the social media app monitoring on KidsGuard Pro goes one step further, covering Facebook, Instagram, Telegram, Tinder, Snapchat, and several others. The Social Apps sidebar on the Dashboard allows you to check the messages exchanged using the built-in keylogger on the social media apps, along with the photos and videos.
Monitoring web browsing activity
Considering how the internet can be a portal to all forms of malicious and harmful activities, KidsGuard Pro goes above and beyond to keep a tab on your child’s browser activity. The Browser History tab makes it effortlessly easy to grab a list of all the websites your young one has visited.
It is all broken down by date and frequency of visits, along with the website name and web address right next to it. Furthermore, the parental control app is capable of recovering deleted web browser history, so no stone is left unturned.
Smart Location Tracking
Apart from keeping the interests of your child safe online, you may also want to ensure the safety of your loved one when they’re away from home. KidsGuard Pro has devised an all-in-one location tracking tool that not only pinpoints the live location of your kid, but allows you to monitor when your child arrives or leaves a particular location. Apart from detailed timestamps of all locations visited, you can even set up Geofence alerts that alert you when your child enters or exits a designated area on the map.
Apart from intuitive location tracking and geofencing features, you also get Wi-Fi location logging with the KidsGuard Pro app. Complete details of how long your child logged on to a Wi-Fi network and the precise location of the Wi-Fi network connection takes location tracking to the next level. However, the Geofencing and Wi-Fi Logger features are available only for Android users.
Remotely access media files
A major aspect of safeguarding the interest of your young one, is shading them from explicit content and harmful media. KidsGuard Pro brings in the ability to remotely access the photos and videos stored on the Android and iOS device. Apart from viewing the camera roll, the parental monitoring app gives you total access to all media files stored on the hosts’ smartphone.
KidsGuard Pro on iPhone allows you to get a hold of everything from photos, videos, app media, notes, reminders, contacts, and more. On the other hand, KidsGuard for Android phones let you do all of that along with access the keylogger files that stores the more sensitive information, and device information too.
All of the above is offered through a KidsGuard Pro app that can be installed and forgotten on your kids’ smartphone. You don’t need to root your Android phone or jailbreak the iPhone to this nifty parental monitoring tool, with complete data exporting feature that works wirelessly. For Android phones, there’s even a Remote Control feature built in that allows you take photos and screenshots without the user knowing.
What we liked
- KidsGuard Pro offers more comprehensive control over the target device than any other parental control app we have tried out.
- The ability to hide the KidsGuard Pro for Android app on the device makes it a stealthy parental monitoring tool.
- Although the process to install the app on the target device was not too straightforward, it was made easier with step-by-step guides and video tutorials.
- Monitors more than 30 different elements, including location tracking, calls and SMS, stored media files, photos and videos, keylogging, and so much more.
- The user experience is seamless, with the Dashboard offering a detailed, yet simplified view of every element on the target device.
What could be better
- A limited trial feature that allows testing out the features of KidsGuard Pro before making a purchase would be ideal.
- Some of the more advanced features such as screen recording and remote control isn’t available for iOS devices.
Our verdict – Is KidsGuard Pro worth it?
It should not come as a surprise that parental monitoring tools are on the rise, and it is not only because helicopter parenting is becoming more prevalent. The increased cyberbullying, explicit content online, and rampant exploitation on the web gives parents all the more reason to keep a watchful eye on how their young ones are using their smartphones.
ClevGuard KidsGuard Pro was an obvious choice to make when looking to review the best parental monitoring tools, since it covers both, Android and iOS mobile platforms. From a user’s point of view, the features offered by KidsGuard Pro for Android are fairly advanced in comparison to others out there, giving you hands-on control off everything on the target device.
While the number of permissions required by the app to work on Android is astounding, as you go about using the tool, you realize those are essential to get next-level features such as geofencing, remote control, and app data monitoring. Despite being tech-savvy, it took us an extra minute to have the app set up, but the tutorials and videos did make the ordeal a whole lot simpler.
However, when comparing KidsGuard Pro for iOS to the Android version, the monitoring tools has lackluster performance, with no on-device app for real-time monitoring. Every piece of data or media you want to get off the iOS device first needs to go through the computer, which makes it seem mediocre in comparison to the completely wireless monitoring solution on the Android variant.
To be fair, due to the closed-loop design of iOS, you won’t find a parental monitoring tool that does a better job than KidsGuard Pro, so comparing it to its Android counterpart might be too much to ask. So if you are in the market to find a comprehensive parental control app that works on all mobile devices, you can’t do much better than KidsGuard Pro.
