Gryphon HomeBound

I’ll answer my own question. No. You don’t. This app nearly killed me(I’m not joking. Research the thing you might have heard of called mental health). It sure gave me a load of mental health issues. Look, you probably don’t care what a 14 year old thinks about your stupid app but maybe someone will read this and actually care. You don’t deserve to know my situation but I’ll tell you this darn app thing did not help it whatsoever. I was doing just fine until this came around. Congrats on ruining a good life. And look, I understand why this app exists but don’t just think about the lives you could be affecting next time. Maybe you have but obviously it didn’t show in the app.

The idea of being able filter content to protect my children while they are away from home is great and was one of the main selling points for our family purchasing a Gryphon router and paying for the premium services. But as I’ve come to realize the HomeBound application is not usable for our family at this time. It does too good of a job filtering content as we cannot stream music reliably while connected to the VPN. It makes normal use of our phones a nightmare. I have not found any easy reliable way to turn off the VPN when it wants to prevent any sort of internet activity on our devices. The dealbreaker for me and why I will not use the app anymore for my kids is it prevents us from seeing our child’s location via “Find My Phone”. Although we can prevent certain traffic from being blocked through the Gryphon app it would be greatly received if there was some machine learning that would take the communities white list entries and compile them to a known database that would assist future users from going through the same headache of researching all the blocked sites and whitelisting them. There is much to be improved upon but I hope this app gets there someday as the idea is great.

After installing HomeBound on my sons iPod, now he can’t access the internet at all unless he’s at home. The developers said that there is an issue and then nothing. I’ve paid for a years subscription and it worked for about two weeks and now it’s been two months of not working at all. Wish I had spent my money on a solution that worked.

Between several vacations and sleepovers I’ve been able to confirm the app properly “tethers” our kids’ iPads to our gryphon at home and enforces our web browsing policies wherever they are. I recommend the Gryphon system. I don’t think there’s any way any system could be perfect given technology constraints, but this is the best system I’ve found for our needs.

This used to work well. Now it seems to be more buggy, and has a hard time connecting. It needs better features, and an update. Interface is rather limited.

First, you have to scan the original base code. Can’t be any of the extensions. Once I figured that out the app said “subscription expired”. It would make sense to have a button that says “click here to renew”. No such luck in homebound or gryphon app.

Does not work when installed on iPad. iOS 14

Installed seamlessly on two iOS devices. We tested one of them extensively and determined that the homebound was NOTDefeated by simple tricks like closing the app (I assume it maintains the VPN profile whether the app is closed, as long as it is not deleted). Three things worth mentioning that were not in the description: 1-on iOS at least, whether at home or roaming on cellular outside the home, still allows texts and phone calls to be made. This is good. 2-In the main Gryphon connect app, there is an option to disable/re-enable the HomeBound feature for that device. No need to uninstall if you want to disable it. 3-this may be more of a Gryphon connect thing, but I never saw any splash screens to request access. Just failed to connect.

I thank you for your excellent service. All is well now that I know I can control the system with split tunnel vpns such as AdGuard, Freedome by F-Secure, and utilizing HomeBound together. This will allow me to always see my security cameras. With masked IP and the ability to come and go and always see what is happening at home this application is fantastic.

The app worked for a day or two then stopped logging our child’s activity. We sent a request for support and submitted a log. Still no response except automated emails after 5 days. Finally got an email directing me to a webpage that did not address my issue. With a little more patience we finally got helpful responses. The app now works pretty well on our iOS devices.