Privacy on a Shared Phone

Child Mode Is Rules, Not a Locked-Down Screen

When your child's mode is active, they're on the same phone with the same home screen and the same list of installed apps — KidMoat doesn't swap in a separate, restricted launcher. What changes is which apps are governed: an app you've marked essential is always reachable, an app you've limited stops working once its daily minutes are spent, an app you've blocked doesn't open at all. Any app you haven't categorized one way or the other opens normally, exactly as it would in parent mode.

That last point matters more on a shared phone than a dedicated one, because it's your phone. Messaging, mail, photos, banking — any app that was on the phone before you set your child up on it is still there, and still openable, unless you've explicitly set it to blocked. KidMoat does not detect "this looks like a personal app" and lock it down for you. If there's something on your phone you don't want your child opening, block it yourself in your app settings before the first hand-off, not after.

What Your Child Can't Do

Leave child mode without your PIN. The exit is gated server-side, checked against your PIN with a lockout after repeated wrong guesses, and there is no settings trick or button around it.

What Doesn't Work in Child Mode on a Shared Phone

Two features that work on a child's own dedicated phone are switched off entirely while a shared phone is in child mode:

• On-device web filtering. The content filter that blocks unwanted sites on a dedicated child phone doesn't run on a shared one.
• Location and safe zones. Location isn't collected and geofence alerts don't fire.

Both are switched off for the same reason: they'd have to run continuously and device-wide to work at all, but the phone is yours the rest of the time and may host up to three different children besides. Rather than filter or track your own browsing and movements between hand-offs, KidMoat doesn't run either feature on a shared phone at all. If web filtering or location matters as much to you as the screen time controls, that's a reason to set the child up on a phone of their own instead.

What You Should Do Before the First Hand-Off

• Block anything you don't want opened. Go through your own apps and set the ones you'd rather your child not reach — messaging, mail, banking, photos — to blocked, rather than assuming they're hidden by default.
• Mark real essentials as essential, not as a privacy setting — it just means the app keeps working even once the day's screen time is spent (useful for something like a phone dialer, not a substitute for blocking).

What You Can See of Your Child

Once you're back in parent mode, your dashboard shows the same things for a shared-phone child as for a child on their own device: their screen time, their coins and streak, and their weekly reports. None of it is visible to your child while they're in their own mode, and none of it is shared outside your family. See How Gamification Works for what that reporting actually covers.