What Google Family Link can't do

Last updated: 20 September 2026

Google Family Link is free, it is made by the company that makes Android, and it is already on the phone. If you are looking at any other parental control app, the honest first question is why you would not simply use that one.

This page is our answer, written by people who sell an alternative — so read it with that in mind, and note that a good part of it says use Family Link.

Start with what it is genuinely good at

Not a courtesy paragraph. If these are the things you need, stop here and go and set it up, because you will not do better for free:

• App install approval. Nothing arrives on the phone without you saying yes.
• Screen time, daily and per app, with a bedtime schedule.
• Content filtering — SafeSearch, Play ratings, YouTube restrictions, site blocking in Chrome.
• Location, on a map, without a subscription.
• It costs nothing and it needs no factory reset. You can set it up this evening on a phone that is already in use, which is a genuinely large advantage and the main reason this page is not simply an advertisement.
• Supervision lives on the Google Account, not the app. Deleting the Family Link app does not end it, and neither does factory-resetting the phone. That is much stronger than most people assume, and stronger than most paid apps manage.

Most families do not need anything else. Three specific things send people looking, and they are the three below.

1. It does not know which network your child is on

Family Link can block an app, and it can put a time limit on an app. It cannot say this app on wifi, never on mobile data, because it has no per-app concept of the network at all. An app is allowed or it is not.

So the most common version of this problem has no Family Link answer:

YouTube is fine at home. It is not fine eating my data plan on the bus every afternoon.

Family Link makes you choose one or the other, all week, everywhere.

Google does sell network controls, and it is worth knowing why they do not solve it either. Family Wi-Fi on Google Wifi and Nest Wifi lets you pause the internet or block adult content — but it works per device, on your own home network. That is exactly backwards for a data plan: it controls the phone in the one place where the data is free, and has no reach at all in the place where the bill is being run up.

This is the gap our app exists in. It is a narrow gap, and if it is not your problem, Family Link is the better tool.

2. On your child's thirteenth birthday, they can switch it off

This is the one that surprises parents, and it is worth reading twice.

In most countries, including Canada and the US, 13 is the age at which a person may run their own Google Account. On that birthday Google emails your child and asks whether they would like to manage their own account. If they say yes, supervision ends — app approvals, screen time, YouTube filters, the lot.

You are notified. You are not asked.

That is not a bug and it is not Google being careless; it is a deliberate position about a thirteen-year-old's relationship with their own account, and there is a reasonable case for it. But it means Family Link is a tool with an expiry date set by somebody else's birthday, and a good number of parents find that out on the day.

A related warning, since people reach for it: do not change your child's birth date to postpone this. Google's systems flag sudden birth-year edits on supervised accounts, and the usual outcome is an identity check or a locked account — a worse problem than the one you were solving.

3. It is Google, and the arrangement is the usual one

Family Link needs a Google Account for your child, and that account works the way Google accounts work. Per Google's own disclosures to parents, that includes app activity, device location, and Web & App Activity; if Assistant's voice settings are on, voice recordings too.

None of this is hidden — it is written down, in public, in plain language, and Google is better about saying so than most of this industry. It is a disclosed arrangement rather than a scandal.

It is still an arrangement. Supervising your child's phone with Family Link means their childhood browsing, app use and whereabouts sit in an account at an advertising company. Some parents think that is a fine trade for a free, well-built tool. Some do not, particularly for a younger child, and that is a legitimate position rather than paranoia.

What we do, and — more usefully — what we don't

We make Safeleaf. Being straight about the shape of it:

Safeleaf does not replace Family Link. It has no content filtering, no app-install approval, no web filtering, no location, no screen-time scheduling. If you swapped one for the other you would lose most of what you had.

What it does instead:

• Per-app cellular and wifi control, separately — the thing in section 1, which Family Link has no mechanism for.
• Rules that do not end on a birthday. Safeleaf uses Device Owner, the same mechanism companies use for work phones. There is no age at which the phone's user can dismiss it, because it is not attached to an account the user controls.
• Nothing leaves the phone. No account, no service receiving anything, nothing we could hand over because nothing reaches us. The rules, the usage figures and the audit log stay on your phones.
• Unlocks with no signal, by QR code or a ten-digit code read down the phone.
• Two parents with equal authority, and a record of which one did what.

And the cost, which is real and which we would rather you weighed now:

• Setting it up means factory-resetting the phone. Device Owner can only be granted on a fresh device at the setup wizard. That is Android's rule, not ours, and it exists so that this cannot be done to someone's phone quietly.
• It is not free, and Family Link is.
• Your child will know. Android shows a "managed by your organisation" notice and we cannot hide it, nor would we want to.

Can you run both on one phone?

We do not know, and we are not going to guess in public.

Family Link's child supervision is built around an ordinary consumer phone signed in to a supervised Google Account. Safeleaf enrols the phone as a fully managed device. Those are two different management models and we have not verified, on a real handset, that a supervised child account can be added to a device enrolled this way.

So plan on the cautious assumption: if you enrol a phone with Safeleaf, expect to be without Family Link's filtering and app approval on that phone, and test it yourself before relying on the combination. When we have tested it properly this section will say what we found, in as many words.

We would rather leave a question mark here than have you discover the answer after resetting your child's phone.

So, plainly

Use Family Link if you want app approval, content filtering, screen time or location, if your child is comfortably under 13, and if a Google account holding their activity is a trade you are happy with. It is free and it is good.

You need something else if the actual problem is a data plan rather than screen time, if your child is nearly 13 and you would like the arrangement to outlast that, or if the account is the part you object to.

If two of those three are true, have a look at what we built — and read what your phone can already do for free first, because on a Xiaomi or an Oppo the answer to section 1 is a setting you already own.

Safeleaf is built by n12n in New Brunswick. We are not affiliated with Google, and Google Family Link is Google's product and trademark. Everything above is our reading of Google's own published documentation as of the date at the top; Google changes things, so check anything you are about to rely on. Corrections to n12n.can@proton.me — we would genuinely rather be right than flattering.