MONTGOMERY, Texas - s4story -- Parental control app for iPhone SimpleSentinel launches: one tap pauses the phone, the clock stays locked, one price covers every child

A new parental control app for iPhone and iPad, SimpleSentinel™, is now available on the App Store. A parent can pause a child's phone in one tap, from anywhere, with calls still working. Downtime runs on a clock the child cannot change, with as many windows a week as the family needs. A task can lock the phone until it is checked off. A message can stay on the child's screen until it is acknowledged, and an emergency alarm sounds through Silent mode in both directions, from child to parent and parent to child. One price covers every child and every device, billed by Apple.

"Screen Time on my children's phones would not stay set. Settings I turned off came back on after updates, the children kept finding ways onto the internet I had not thought to close, and the last straw was both of them telling me strangers were sending inappropriate messages through the gaps it left open. I went looking for an app that closed every hole. It did not exist, so I built it." says Joshua Lindsey, founder of SimpleSentinel and the father in a homeschool family in Montgomery, Texas.

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The app never reads what a child types, watches or browses, and does not track location. Two of the gaps parents describe most often have a switch most have never seen. Siri answers web searches even when the browser is blocked, and a child can end downtime by rolling the phone's clock back. SimpleSentinel publishes where those switches are in Apple's Settings and closes both inside the app.

Alongside the launch, SimpleSentinel publishes a reading of 6,731 App Store reviews of ten widely used parental control apps, the research that shaped the product. The average rating across the sample is 2.65 out of 5, and 3,722 of the reviews, 55 percent, are one or two stars. The complaints cluster into five things, and none of them is "it did not block enough": trust (659 reviews, nearly one in ten, many written by children), setup (534), rules and limits that did not hold (353), billing (311), and children getting around the controls (283).

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"The reviews say the same thing in six thousand voices. Parents are not asking for more surveillance. They are asking for rules that stay put, a setup that takes minutes, and a bill they understand," Lindsey says.

It is on the App Store at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simplesentinel/id6799535985. The study, its method and the per-app table are at https://simplesentinel.com/parental-control-app-reviews-study.

Media contact: Joshua Lindsey, press@simplesentinel.com