I bought a couple of Tesco Hudl tablets for my six-year-old twin daughters for Christmas. The main reasons I chose them were the cost and the fact that they ran a pretty much unchanged version of the Android 4.2.2 (Jelly Bean) operating system along with access to all of the apps on Google Play. They had also received good reviews since being launched in September 2013.
Coming from primarily using Apple devices running iOS, and having bought them an iPod Touch the year before, I was hoping that the parental control options would be similar, (as I feel they are too young to have unfettered access to the internet, YouTube etc, and in iOS you can stop them buying in-app purchases placed there by devious developers). In iOS, all of this is set behind a PIN number in a ’Restrictions’ setting and it is really nicely implemented. I had read about the Hudl and seen that you could set similar parental controls, but not really looked into it too much before I bought it. I also hadn’t used Android for a few years, when I only used it for a couple of weeks before switching back to iOS.
So when I was setting them up, I found out there was no such option in the Android settings. After a bit of looking around I came across the help page on the Tesco Tech Support site, but this didn’t help too much, it just basically pointed you to the Google Play store and told you to take your pick.
I started removing the default Tesco apps and widgets and thought about creating a separate user profile, but there were some limitations in doing this, one of which was that it would have taken a long time (especially as I was setting up two tablets). I did some further research and there are few options open to you, but thought I would share what I used the end.
Parental controls app
There seem to be a handful of different options for this kind of app, but the one I chose was a free app called Kid’s Shell that allows you to run the tablet in two modes: ’Kids’ and ’Parent’. Access between the two modes is protected by a random simple multiplication question. In parent mode, you then just simply drag the apps you want your child to have access to onto the kids screen. The kids mode prevents all in-app purchases and simplifies the home screen. The paid version of the app allows you to change the desktop background and add folders, add a timer and block internet connections.
Internet restrictions
At first, I registered with Google Play using my own Google account, but then decided to restore the factory settings and register a new Google account using childname.hudl@gmail.com (apparently it isn’t possible to switch Google accounts once set up!). By then logging in to Google search using this account and getting it to remember the details and stay signed in, you can set SafeSearch to ’on’ and lock it to this account, so if they do happen to search for anything unsuitable it gets blocked. Google SafeSearch is linked to YouTube’s Safety Mode, so signing in to YouTube with the same Google account will enable this and filter any excplicit content. I did try a couple of ’kid safe’ content filtered browsers, but found them to be a bit unstable. Speaking of which, I ended up using the Firefox mobile browser as Google Chrome crashed all the time when loading CBeebies games.
Limitations
This setup was aimed at my six year old daughters, as they get older I am sure it won’t take long to look up their multiplication tables to switch to parent mode or close the Kid’s Shell app, so I think the PIN number implementation on iOS is superior in this respect. Also, the internet/YouTube restrictions are not ideal as simply signing out renders it useless, but they are not yet at the age where they are searching for lots of content, so I will revisit this later on. In the meantime I can periodically check the browser history.
Summary
There is no doubt that at the moment, the iOS implementation of parental controls is superior, but I am sure improvements will come to Android in the future. In the meantime, some form of control is possible, it just takes a bit more time and is not as elegant or easy to set up. However, even if I could afford iPads for them, I think at this age the Hudls are perfect, especially when combined with the Tesco kids rubber protective case.