How to Keep KidMoat Running in the Background on Android?

KidMoat on your child's phone only works while it is running. It does not need the screen on and it does not need your child to open it — but the app has to be alive in the background to enforce limits, filter content, and report to your dashboard.

Android, meanwhile, has one overriding goal for background apps: kill them to save battery. Every Android phone does this to some degree, and most manufacturers add their own, more aggressive layer on top. When KidMoat gets caught by one of these battery systems, the symptoms are always the same:

• the child's device shows offline in your parent dashboard,
• screen-time limits stop being enforced until the app is next opened,
• activity reports have gaps.

None of that is a fault in the phone or the app — it is the phone doing exactly what its battery settings tell it to do. The fix is a one-time trip through those settings on the child's device, and this guide is the map.

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Find your device's guide first

The settings that matter differ by manufacturer — sometimes radically. A Pixel needs two changes; a vivo needs closer to ten. So we have written a separate, screenshot-by-screenshot guide for each brand we see on children's devices.

We support Android 12 and above, so every guide covers those versions — where a brand's menus changed between Android versions, the guide has a section per version.

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The three settings every Android phone has

Whatever the brand, the same three ideas come up. Knowing them makes any manufacturer's menus less mysterious:

1. Battery optimization

Android puts every app in a battery mode: optimized (the default — the system may kill it), restricted (killed aggressively), or unrestricted (left alone). KidMoat needs unrestricted. On most phones this lives under Settings → Apps → KidMoat → Battery.

2. Background data

An app that survives in the background still needs the network to report to you. Background data and — on phones that have it — unrestricted data usage (so Data Saver does not cut it off) should both be on for KidMoat.

3. The manufacturer's own app killer

This is the one that catches people out. Samsung has sleeping apps, Xiaomi has Autostart, Huawei has App launch, vivo and OPPO have auto-launch and background power controls. These are separate from Android's own battery optimization and are usually on by default. The brand guides above walk through each one with screenshots.

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Two habits that undo all of it

Force-stopping the app. If your child opens Recents and swipes KidMoat away — or "force stops" it from Settings — some manufacturers treat that as permission to keep it dead. KidMoat's device-admin protections bring it back, but tamper alerts in your dashboard are worth watching.

System updates. A major Android or manufacturer OS update can quietly reset these settings to their defaults. If the child's device starts showing offline after an update, walk through your brand's guide once more — it takes two minutes the second time.

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When it's set up correctly

You should see the child's device stay online in your dashboard through the night, limits enforcing at the exact minute they are due, and no gaps in activity reports. That is the whole test — if the dashboard looks right for 48 hours, the phone is configured right.