Covenant Eyes 17+

Amazing app - Needs more tweaks.

Overall, CE has been a great experience. It does the work to limit/restrict access to adult websites, but it will not set you free. Remember, this is meant to supplement your conversations, provide accountability, but ultimately you have to want freedom more than you want porn. CE played a pivotal role in my freedom from porn, so I recommend it for whoever is looking to get free. You combine CE with an invested friend, some hard conversations, brutal self-honesty & self-examination — if you’re a faith-based individual, involve God too.

The app itself works great for the most part, but some future updates could include more cohesiveness with iOS. For example, adding bookmarks to the home screen, importing calendar events from a website/email into your calendar, opening email attachments, using Face ID to auto fill passwords directly from iCloud Keychain bypassing the extra step of finding the website login, etc. keep up the great work!

Developer Response ,

Hi pm514v, thank you for sharing your experience with us. We're always glad to be part of someones story! We also believe that having a trusted accountability friend is vital to finding freedom. We also appreciate you passing along your suggestions. I will pass those along to the management team.

Many issues that make it extremely frustrating

This is a great concept. I actually was really excited for it, and love the idea. However, there are so many issues with the app and the VPN. Recently, my phone will have an extremely difficult time connecting to the VPN both on WiFi and LTE, so literally nothing loads. Luckily I can still text, but it removes the ability to use any other function that needs WiFi or data. It usually fixes itself on WiFi, but I cannot do anything with my data plan. I try to refresh settings within the covenant eyes app; I turn my airplane mode on and off; I turn my phone off and on; I turn the VPN off and on to let it reconnect, but nothing has solved the issue. This is just so annoying.

Similarly, (I know this is the phone app, but I think it’s worth mentioning) the desktop application has many issues as well. It makes it very difficult to load webpages. Sometimes I have to type in my search or refresh the page over 10 times for anything to happen. And this happens multiple times through every single time I use my laptop. And yes. My antivirus software has everything set up the way it should because I had a covenant eyes employee do it for me. Also, the other attempted “fix” has been given to me as well. There is no blocking features anymore, just the screenshot settings. However, the issue persists. It makes every other part of life very difficult. I hope this can be fixed because it is a great idea, but makes me want to stop using the service.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. Would you be willing to contact us at 877-479-1119 so that we can take another look at the difficulties you are experiencing?

Phone is unusable unless browser is open in background

So with the recent update that uses a VPN to track everything on the phone, I thought “what a great idea”. It was just another way to keep everyone more accountable. Well my happiness was quickly turned into sadness when I could not longer text, use my apps, or call people. Yes for a whole day my phone was completely useless. The only app that worked was the Covenant Eyes app. (I am the type of person that closes an app out, once I’m finished using it. I don’t like to have a bunch of apps running in the background) So at one point I didn’t close out Covenant Eyes and I let it stay open in the background. It was at this point I started to receive texts that hadn’t been coming through, and I noticed that my other apps started working. Basically the VPN connected to Covenant Eyes blocks my phone from connecting to my cellular network unless I keep the browser app open at all times. This is not okay!!!!!

On top of all of that, the app is buggy. It constantly asks me to sign in, it constantly deletes all of my open tabs, and it constantly crashes. Sometimes it crashes and I don’t realize it and then if people have been texting me, I don’t receive anything. This app has really become a problem. The use of a VPN was a great idea, but it has never been perfected. It’s almost like they released it without testing it first. If they don’t fix this soon, I’m going to have to cancel my subscription.