Gabb Messenger 17+

This app has been a blessing! It helped me catch a bully and find out about bullying that my child didn't tell me about. This app flags curse words, racial slurs, and Web links. in the app, it says that your child will not receive the messages if the person is not in their contacts but if the person is in their contacts, unfortunately the child will still see the flag messages. I am using this with an old iPhone and I have no problems from day one.

So many things to unpack here. Two years ago we got the gabb watches for our daughters. The gps was fantastic and we could easily track and connect. In August we decided to upgrade to the gabb 4 pro phones. The gps regularly does not work. My child will be sitting next to me in the dining room and I will get a notice that she left. Other times we will be 15 miles from home before I get a notice that they’ve left home. They have the same phone & plan but one can receive video messages in messenger and one cannot. Spent quite a bit of time trying to find an answer in settings. There is not one. I did find much of the versions are different between the two. They are both however clunky and difficult to manage. I deeply regret these phones. I should have gotten iPhones through my regular plan. It would have been cheaper and easier to manage.

This app is buggy. The overall Gabb experience has been clunky.
I like that the phone itself has no social media and looks like a "real" phone.
However, this app is constantly notifying me that there are messages for me to review, but when I go to the app, there may be nothing, there may be 10 new messages. There is a lag time between the message on your child's phone and the message appearing on the app.
Phone calls are not logged on this app. I think I have to log in to the Gabb website to see that. There is also a separate Gabb app to track my child's phone location.
The fact that I am logging into 3 different things to get full use of the Gabb phone is awkward and annoying.