Children these days enjoy playing games on their parent's phones and tablets. The problem is what if junior decides to explore your text app and send gibberish text messages to everyone in your address book! What if the little guy discovers there is a little button with a trash can on it and happens to be in your notes app or your photo roll app. Uh oh!
We have a five year old and more than once has he discovered some of these things to do. Fortunately photos are backed up via iCloud and Google+ photos. That is a topic for another post on how to set that up. Since my wife has an iPhone and I use an Android, we get to see apps on both platforms in our house. Here is a little challenge - Apple vs. Android - find a child lock app to lockdown which apps your little one can access.
Off to google with some searches - "android child lock app" and "iphone child lock app" - The Android search pops right up with a great result in the #1 spot called "Kids Place". I downloaded it and put it to use right away. It works great as an app launcher where you pick the apps that you want to put on new child ready home screen. In order to come out of the child's home screen you will push the exit button and the you have to enter a four digit PIN that you will know but will block your child from exiting.
Now off to the iOS offerings. Um, well not quite a clear answer here. This is where the apple restrictions on what third party apps can do seems to make a sandbox app like this not possible. I'm looking through all the search pages and not really finding anything at all like what Android has.
The closest thing I can find is under
Settings > General >Accessibility > Guided Access
If you turn this on with a passcode you can then start up a single child friendly app and triple click the home button to pop-up the option to activate the guided access lock. This will prevent the child from leaving the app to go explore the other icons on your home screen! When you want to escape out of the lockdown, triple click the button again and enter your passcode.
If you have other suggestions for iPhone and child lock ideas, please put them in the comments.
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