My son turned 13 this past summer. My wife and I work until about 6:00 and we feel he is old enough to stay home alone after school a couple days a week and give our parents a break in babysitting.
However he has an unhealthy obsession with electronics. It’s so bad that he will do anything he can to play video games and watch youtube. that usually means homework doesn’t get done and grades nosedive.
We have instituted a rule that if his grades drop below a B, he gets grounded from electronics. This means we literally lock up the xbox controllers, Nintendo DS’s, remote controls and his cell phone (the android phone I had before I upgraded to the S3).
We are thinking that if we leave him home alone, we want him to have access to his phone so he can call and/or text us when he gets home or has any issues. But if he is grounded, we still want him to be able to call and text, but not play any games. Does anyone out there have any experience with any of the App Lockers on Google Play? He’s pretty smart and can get around a lot of basic security.
Ideally, it would be as simple as turning it on when he is grounded so he only can call and text, but we can turn it off when he gets his grades up and he can play his games again.
Might it be a viable option to get him a simple, no-frills non-smart phone? One that is capable of making and receiving phone calls and text messages, but not much else? Do they even make such phones any more?
I was thinking that, too. Just a pre-paid dumb phone. Make him carry it to school. Might be an embarrassing enough deterrent in itself!
If he’s good a working around/hacking stuff - the only other thing you might be able to do is delete the apps off his phone entirely when grounded, as long as he can’t figure out the username and password to the Play Store to re-upload them. That would be a pain in the arse, though.
I’m not sure that works on an Android like it does on an iPhone. I don’t think you can actually log out of the Android system.
But here’s what you can do, though it’s more then what you want…Go to a computer that’s logged into the same account as the phone, go to this website https://www.google.com/android/devicemanager
From there you can Lock the phone (as well as a few other things including locating it on a map)… Hit the button that says “Send a notification to your device” which then makes a little icon pop up on the phone to install something that will give you the option to lock it remotely.
It’s more then you’re looking for, I know, but I wanted to put it out there in case you can’t find something else.
Either way, it’s still good to know that the service exists in case he loses the phone. It nice to click on that and realize that he left it at someone’s house before you spend 20 minutes looking all over for it.
Oops, I was thinking of purchases. And thanks for that link - I didn’t know about that service and always thought I better not lose my phone in the couch, I’d never find it, now I can make it ring.
I second (third?) this. It’s a simple solution and it’s not something that can be hacked around. There are still plenty of dumb phones around. Many are designed for the elderly, with only simple options for calling and texting. Nokia, Doro, Samsung etc all have basic models, and some are pretty cheap too.
But, keep in mind as I said above, you do have to install something on your phone as well for that to work.
I have no idea, though, if the person that stole your phone can just uninstall that app before you have a chance to wipe it. I would hope that the app would require a password to be uninstalled. In fact, I would hope that app would require a password to even to a factory reset.
There are a few out there, where you either blacklist the apps you don’t want, or if possible, whitelist what you’d want him to use (if he has a ton of apps).