Most of the apps on my children’s phones did not arrive because I chose them. They arrived because a friend had it, or a school group used it, or it was raining on a Sunday.
I have made every mistake available here, including the one where I installed a drawing app for a six year old and discovered a week later that it had a public gallery with comments in it.
So this is the checklist I now run before anything goes on a child’s phone. It takes about fifteen minutes. It is not about being strict, it is about knowing what you have said yes to.
1. Who can talk to my child in here?
This is the first question and it is not close.
Almost every serious harm that comes to children through a phone arrives through a channel where a stranger can reach them. Not through the game itself. Through the chat attached to the game, the comments under the video, the friend request, the team voice channel.
So look for three things. Can anyone outside the family send my child a message, in any form, including drawings, stickers, or a username? Can my child publish anything that strangers can see? Can strangers see my child’s name, photo, city or age?
If the answer to the first one is yes, everything else on this list matters less, and you should decide about that one thing on its own terms.
Free typing is the sharpest edge. An app where a child can only answer with a fixed set of pictures or buttons is a fundamentally different object from one with a text box in it, even if both are described as chat.
2. What leaves the phone, and where does it go?
Ask, for each piece of data: is it stored on the phone, on a company’s server, or sent on to third parties.
The items worth checking specifically are the child’s real name, their photographs, their location, their voice, their contacts, and their birthday.
On both app stores there is now a data section in the listing that says what the developer collects and what they share. It is self declared, so it is not gospel, but it is a strong signal, and an app that declares tracking for advertising has told you exactly what it is.
Voice and photos deserve their own thought. Ask whether recordings stay on the device. Ask how long photographs are kept, and whether they can be deleted.
3. Who is paying for this?
If the app is free, and there is no subscription, then either it is a hobby project, or it is funded by something. Usually that something is advertising, which means your child’s attention is the product being sold, and often their data with it.
This is not a moral panic, it is arithmetic. Servers cost money. Someone is paying.
I would rather pay a small amount for a children’s app than have it monetise a nine year old. That is a personal position, not a rule, but it has kept me out of a lot of trouble.
4. Does it try to make my child come back?
Every app wants engagement. The question is how hard it pushes and what it uses.
Look for notifications you cannot turn off, streaks that punish a missed day, rewards that arrive on a random schedule like a slot machine, chests that need a timer or a payment to open, limited time offers, and anything with a countdown aimed at a child.
A fair test: open the settings and see whether the app lets you turn off its own pressure. An app that makes it easy to quiet down is an app that does not need you desperate.
5. Can my child spend money?
Check for in app purchases before installing, and check what the currency is. Many children’s games have two currencies, one earned and one bought, specifically so that the boundary is blurry.
Then check your own phone settings, because the app’s promise is only half of it. Both platforms let you require approval for every purchase, and both let you turn purchases off entirely. Do that once and forget about it.
6. Can I see what it does, and change it?
A children’s app should have a grown-up side, and it should be protected by something a child cannot guess.
Look for: a parent area behind a code, a way to see what your child has done in the app, a way to change the rules, and a way to delete things.
A related question: does the app work on two parents’ phones, or does it assume one adult owns everything? Families are not shaped like one login.
7. How do we get out?
The last question is the one nobody asks in the shop.
Can you delete the account and the data, and is it obvious how? Does the app hold anything that your child would lose in a way that feels like a punishment for leaving? Is there anything that cannot be exported or recovered if a phone is lost?
Leaving should be as boring as arriving.
How to actually check in fifteen minutes
Install it on your own phone first, not the child’s.
Play it for ten minutes as if you were eight. Try to find a chat. Try to spend money. Try to reach the internet.
Open the settings and read every switch.
Read the data section in the store listing.
Then hand it over, and for the first week, sit next to your child for a few minutes while they use it. You will learn more in those minutes than in any review, because children find things adults do not.
One thing the checklist misses
None of this replaces the conversation.
The most protective thing in our house has never been a setting. It has been that my children know, with total certainty, that if something strange happens on a screen they can tell me and nothing bad will happen to them. No confiscation, no shouting, no “I told you so”.
A child who is afraid of losing the tablet will hide the problem. That single fear undoes more safety features than any app can add.
Where Pluck fits
I will be honest that Pluck is also an app asking for a share of your child’s attention, and you should run this list on it too. What I can tell you is how we answered these questions for ourselves. Nobody outside the family can reach a child in Pluck, and a child never types free text to anyone, since the buddy talks in questions with picture answers and there is no AI in it. Nothing leaves the family, there are no ads and no trackers, and proof photos are deleted within about a day. The parent side sits behind a grown-up code, two parents can share one family, and the app is paid for by one subscription for the whole family after thirty days free, which means the person paying for it is you and not an advertiser. That last part is the whole design, really.