Canopy - Parental Control App

This app filters out so much stuff. The other apps don’t come close to the protection you get with this one. Well worth it. I recommend it to everyone.

The first thing I noticed when we installed this on our sons’ PCs was that the app kept reporting “ Oops something went wrong. Unable to retrieve a report“ which is not very helpful. When my son turned on his computer, it sounded like an airplane trying to take off - task manager showed power usage for Canopy as “Very High.” We thought it may be an update so we waited, but it continued. Then, the final straw was my son not being able to see HIS OWN videos on YouTube. He has a channel, which we are aware of, monitor, and support. He is not able to see any of his videos on his channel, or most of the videos on several of his friends’ channels, though he can browse YouTube otherwise. What is the point of monitoring software if it allows all sorts of random content, but no rhyme or reason to it? Where is the parental CONTROL? I generously gave the app 2 stars because I appreciate the concept of blocking inappropriate content from the getgo, and the fact I DID get a notification when it was uninstalled. However, we’ll have to find another solution. Unfortunately we already paid for the year.

It’s important to read the instructions and find great ways to protect your child.

We installed this app on all 3 of our teens phones. We keep the settings pretty closed off and they do pretty good. But got an alert one night and we were able to deal with the situation quickly and safely. Without the app who knows how long it would have been before we found out. Highly recommend!

Canopy works as advertised and I haven’t noticed too much of a speed difference. The main problem is over blocking content (better this than not enough) and a terrible UI on the app. The parent app is slow to respond and cumbersome. Not intuitive to use and highly manual. At the very least, canopy devs should look into the ability to “copy and paste” setting from one device to the next. Some users have multiple devices that all need the same settings, it would be super helpful if you could copy those settings across devices.

It’s constantly running in the background and drains your battery quickly. Before installing canopy at this time on a normal day my phone would be at 98, 99 percent battery. With canopy it’s already down to 90. Had to remove canopy. It’s not worth the drain on my battery that it causes.

Canopy is great for blocking explicit content, but we have found it sometimes makes apps and internet not work at all. The kids are regularly frustrated because they can’t get on YouTube or certain games will just stop working.

I like that the app does what it is advertised to do. I would give it a 5 if there were two things it did better: 1) make it easier to see what has been blocked, and 2) make initial set up easier.

Installed the app to trial and cancelled, continued being billed for months now. I’ve had at least 20 emails back and forth and they have zero communication between departments. It’s laughable how poor cross-departmental communication is within this company. So here I am - continuing to be billed for a service I don’t use, from a company that seems as though it’s ran out of someone’s garage. Absolutely terrible. Avoid at all costs and don’t believe all the reviews…I’m beginning to think they’re fake to load the app with a better rating.

This app gets a lot of things right, but I wish there were more restrictions, such as scanning texts for cyberbullying or setting communication limits. With device users becoming younger and younger, I wish there weren’t trade-offs with choosing between parental control apps. The UI in the app is so, so. I wish that each device was listed under the child instead of just having an infinite number of tabs. It’s also very laggy.