Family link,an app developed by Google to assist parents track as well as regulate their children’s activities on their device with features that allows parents to set their children’s bedtime, know their location and even the amount of time spent on devices so as to avoid addictions just had more features incorporated into it.
The new features which were updated today we’re earlier made known to the public at spring during the Google developers conference. The newly updated features “per-app limit” and time bonus help parents control the amount of time their children spends on individual apps on their device and also enables the parents to allow their children a little more time in cases where they maybe rounding up activities on an app. That is, the parents could give their kids bonus time without altering the preset time for the app, respectively. It is also important to note that these features compliment the screen time feature.
It is important that parents help their children explore and get relevant information about their world, and what better way to do that, than access to devices, which however could become addictive as some apps are created to Foster this purpose. Addiction to devices is a challenge even to adults as some apps are very involving.
In time past, giant enterprises such as Apple and Google were unbothered about users app addiction, but we’re however shaken when it became an area of concern to users. Formerly, these companies were very excited about the money generated by the third party developers.
However, in recent times, the concern about the effects of these devices on human health has led to screen time and other digital health friendly attributes being incorporated in devices.
Family link is currently an inbuilt feature in Android 10 and other higher versions of android. This app can be downloaded on it’s own from Google play. The incorporation of this app to the operating system makes it easier to be located and used.
However, the fact that apps are not categorized would require more work on the part of the parents to better enforce their control on their children devices, and this limitation should be dealt with soon.
Interesting, parents can now control family link setting on their Android or iOS device
