Is This App Safe for My Child? A 10-Point Checklist You Can Run in 5 Minutes

New app on the tablet? Before your child gets it, give it five minutes and this checklist. You don’t need to be technical — every check below is something you can see with your own eyes.

The 10-point check

1. Open it and watch for ads

Not just whether there are ads, but what kind. Banner ads are bad enough in a kids’ app; full-screen video ads with tiny X buttons are worse; ads for other games designed to trigger “I want that!” are a treadmill. Best answer: no ads at all. An app funded by a clear subscription doesn’t need to sell your child’s attention.

2. Look for any way to talk to strangers

Chat rooms, comments, friend lists, “share your creation,” multiplayer with open chat. For ages 5–10, the safe answer is simple: there shouldn’t be any. A child’s app should contain zero humans your family didn’t invite.

3. Find out what it asks for at setup

A kids’ app should need, at most, a first name or nickname and an age. If it wants your child’s email, full name, photos, contacts or location — stop and ask why. (You’ll rarely find a good answer.)

4. Check where the purchases live

Try to reach a purchase screen as if you were your child, tapping colorful things. If you can get to a payment prompt without hitting a real parental gate (a PIN, or a question a 7-year-old can’t answer), the app is counting on exactly that happening.

5. Count the hooks

Streaks. Daily login rewards. Countdown timers. “Your friend beat your score!” notifications. Every one of these is machinery to make your child need to come back. One is a yellow flag; several is the app’s whole business model showing.

6. Watch what happens when a session ends

Does the app have natural stopping points — a story ends, a puzzle completes? Or does the next thing autoplay before your child can decide? Endings are a feature. Their absence is a choice someone made.

7. Read the privacy policy — just the first screen

You don’t have to read it all. Check two things: is there a policy at all, written for humans? And does it say plainly what’s collected about children? Vague policies (“we may share data with partners”) on a kids’ app are a red flag you can act on.

8. Check the “designed for families” signals

On Google Play, look for the app’s target-age declaration and content rating. Apps in family programs accept stricter rules on ads and data. It’s not a guarantee — but its absence on an app clearly aimed at kids tells you something.

9. Search the developer

Thirty seconds: who makes it? Do they have a website, a face, a story, a way to contact them? A kids’ app from an accountable, findable maker is a different bet from one by “FunGames7773 Ltd.”

10. Sit with your child for the first session

The single highest-value check. Ten minutes of playing together tells you more than any store listing: the tone, the pace, what it nudges your child toward, and how your child behaves when it’s time to stop.

Scoring it

There’s no points system — the checklist works on a simpler rule: any single hard failure on ads-to-strangers (1–4) is a no. Hooks and endings (5–6) are judgment calls about your child. Transparency checks (7–9) tell you whether the maker deserves your benefit of the doubt.

Why we publish this

We make OWLClaw, a companion app for 5–10 year olds — and we wrote this checklist because it’s the exact standard we hold ourselves to: no ads, no stranger contact, nickname-and-age-only setup, purchases locked behind a parent PIN and grown-up gate, no streaks or comeback hooks, sessions that end. Run us through all ten points; that’s what the checklist is for.

Whatever app it is — check it before they play it. Five minutes now beats an uninstall battle later.