CellFamily – family safety app to monitor child’s smartphone activity online
by Antonio Wells
Aug 17, 2012 2:11 PM –
Install
CellFamily aims to help family safety by offering parents an online portal and mobile app to monitor their child’s smartphone activity. It tracks call history, text messages, bad/violent words sent or received, can silence your child’s phone during designated times and more. Is this the ultimate child safety app… let’s find out in this app review!
Price: Free
Tested on: MyTouch 3G Slide, Samsung Galaxy S3
Content Rating: Low Maturity
Pros & Cons:
Pros
- Offers a way to monitor your child’s cell phone use and safety online!
Cons
- The parent must log into a website to monitor rather than from a parent companion app, for now.
- The web history & locate child features did not work in our many tests.
- A child can simply un-install the app if they desire.
- Test message hot word has some false flags.
Features:
I like the idea behind CellFamily, especially for parents with younger children who want a cell phone. It provides a way to monitor incoming and outgoing calls and texts, and gives them a panic button that will text the parent the child’s location repeatedly (if they are moving) in case of emergencies. So in theory, it’s a great app for child mobile monitoring and safety.
As the parent, you would have to sign up for the CellFamily website first (Note: we tested the “SocialGuard” option when registering, therefore we didn’t test the no text and drive feature in the “SafeTeen Driver” package), install the app on your child’s phone, then register their cell phone number for the app to sync their contacts, call history, text message history (flagging hot words), locate your child, and records their web history. This all sounds great in theory but in our many tests we could not get some of the features to work.
The App
The app itself is very basic after you initially set it up. You have to train your child, if they ever need help, they can launch the app, press and hold the ‘Panic Alarm’ button and it will send the parent their location details via text message for them to click a link and locate them via the Maps app.
Web Portal
CellFamily Dashboard
In my test, the web history & locate child features just did not work in our many tests. Bummer! So I’ll focus on the features that did. Once you log into the web portal, you’re greeted with a Dashboard of statistics with your child’s most unknown calls, flagged words, most called, number of minutes used, text messages sent/received and more. The Contact Manager stealthily uploads your child’s contact address book, however, in my case it only seemed to upload about a quarter of them. There is a unique HotWords feature which flags certain words in text messages you child may send/receive- words can be added too. I had a fair false-positive as it flagged “ass” in the text that said “wassup”, yet this could help greatly if your child is being cyber-bullied, plus you can reveal the entire text message when flagged. Lastly, I tried to add another child, or in our case, another phone in the My Child / Add Children feature, however, this seemed to send me to register all over again… so I aborted.
Watch on Mobile
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CellFamily Dashboard
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CellFamily Contact Manager
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CellFamily HotWord Database
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CellFamily Locate My Child
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CellFamily Web History
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CellFamily My Child Add Children
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CellFamily Verify Your Childs Phone Number
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CellFamily Start Screen
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CellFamily Panic Button
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CellFamily Text Message Received
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CellFamily Locator on Map
Usefulness:
Recently, the First Lady Michelle Obama reveals she ‘scared the heck’ out of daughter before giving her a cell phone. We common folk don’t have the resources of the U.S. Secret Service for contacts screening, so CellFamily is a proactive solution for parents to monitor their child’s mobile activity. There is extremely high demand for a mobile monitoring solution for children with smartphones so accessible these days.
In concept CellFamily is useful. Yet in practice, however, the service is very buggy combined with that fact that it doesn’t really give parents an easy way to monitor on the go – they can only get the data from a computer or launch the full website in the browser. Add to that there, there isn’t anything stopping the child from just un-installing the app, a slick child could un-install when naughty and re-install when good, and its usefulness becomes much lower.
Ease of Use:
Be sure to create an online account first to avoid the frustration of opening the app and the first screen is to verify the child’s phone number to continue. Once you set it up, on the child’s phone it’s a matter of ensuring they don’t un-install the app. Then instructing them on how to use the Panic Alarm if needed. The web portal has its straight-forward in areas, but frustrating on the portions that currently do not work.
Tip: until the developer’s fix the un-install loophole, you can use other apps like App Protector to pin code protect the Settings menu, but the caveat is that it will block all their settings- bad idea if they need to dim the screen or anything simple like that. 
Frequently Used:
To be honest, if I were a kid who had this on their phone, I’d probably un-install it immediately. And if I thought my parents would check, I’d just re-install it right before I got home. It’s not like it’s all that hard to do- you just verify the phone number, it doesn’t require a password or anything to install.
Interface:
The interface is almost a non-factor. As far as the app goes, after setup, it’s a big yellow button that says “Panic Alarm”.