AVG Family Safety (for iPhone) Review

AVG Family Safety for iOS (free for users of AVG Family Safety for desktop, or $19.99/year) is a powerful "family-friendly" browser that blocks all sorts of inappropriate content from young eyes: porn, malware, scams, phishing, and much more. It's an Editors' Choice parental control app for iOS. 

Editors' Note: As of March, 2015, AVG no longer distributes this product. If you're looking for a parental control utility, please check out our current Editors' Choice products, Qustodio Parental Control 2015 and ContentWatch Net Nanny 7.

As a parent, you have two sets of controls—monitoring and filtering—to configure from a remote Web interface, which the iOS version shares with AVG's Editors' Choice-winning Family Safety parental control software for the desktop.  However, if you'd rather not go through all the steps to set this up, just choose presets from one of four age categories and you're good to go.

As for the browser, well, it's just an extra layer on top of iOS's default Safari browser and so you'll find all the same features, like bookmarking, browsing history, and omnibox. You can select from all the major search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, Lycos).

Resist Uninstallation, Block Safari Browser
Setup is pretty straightforward, simply create an account with your email and a new password, or, for AVG Family Safety for desktop, just sign in with the same account. Don't forget the password either as you can enter it into the app to override blocked content. Next you'll have to tweak your iOS settings to make AVG the only accessible browser. Do this by going into Settings>General>Restrictions to block Safari.

Customize Levels of Filtering
AVG filters out 61 categories of undesirable websites. You can select categories manually or choose from four age category profiles. Obviously, the younger the age, the more categories of sites that are blocked. You can also select individual categories. You'll find the now-standard categories like porn, politics, abortion, dating, gambling; some of the more unusual categories include unprotected search engines, art nudes, and freeware.

From your parental control dashboard you can also whitelist or blacklist individual URLs and schedule times when Web surfing and gaming are allowed.

AVG also offers ratings-based (using the U.S. rating system) filtering of sites that host movies, TV shows, and games. You can customize ratings within each content category.  In Mobicip Premium ($9.99/year), you can only filter specific YouTube sub-categories. 

Monitor Browsing History, Instant Messages, and More
Like Mobicip, AVG Family Safety also offers remote monitoring. When you click on the Activity Monitoring tab from your Web interface, click toggle ON to see your child's browsing and search histories. The interface also shows, in separate tabs, all instant messages and social networking sites accessed through the AVG Family Safety Browser. In AVG Family Safety on a desktop, you can actually monitor IM and social networking clients outside the browser, but a spokesperson for AVG said iOS prevented this.

Parents can also sign up text or email alerts when a child manages to access a blocked site. Logging in also lets parents see charts detailing the most visited site categories and searches.

Excellent Parental Control App for iOS
AVG  is an excellent, Editors' Choice pick for parental control apps on an iPhone or iPad. It offers one of the most comprehensive sets of configurable settings I've ever seen in a parental control filter, period. 

For more iPhone Software, see:

• Adblock Plus (for iPhone)
• CloudMagic (for iPhone)
• Ridiculous Fishing - A Tale of Redemption (for iPhone)
• AVG PrivacyFix (for iPhone)
• Adobe Photoshop Touch (for iPhone)
• more