Xbox Family Settings 4+

This app is great for managing and moderating all of my children's game time. Rather than having to constantly watch the clock to see how long they have been playing, on top of them constantly bugging their mom and I to play, I am able to set specific times they're allowed to play and for how long. Now that the app will moderate their time for me by forcing them off after two hours, etc. I can just let them get on the Xbox whenever they want and know that they won't be on ALL day. Yep only complaint I have is that when you add extra time, it doesn't seem to add the time correctly for some reason. It seems like sometimes it doesn't add whatever time they still had left to the extra time that I added. It just simply gives them an hour etc. Otherwise, this app is amazing and my wife and I use it regularly now.

Setting are clumsy and terrible to navigate. If for some reason a game is filtered on the Xbox by the settings it won’t tell you what filter is holding back the settings it tells you just what general area of the app it is in, like go to “privacy and online settings to allow” but without telling you which privacy setting is the issue. Kind of ridiculous if you ask me. Not everything is manageable from the app either.. a lot of it needs to be brought up from a browser which defeats the purpose. Now I’m not tech genius but I do have a degree in computer networking and I still struggled with this app at times. It should honestly be a really simple process and able to filter content by game; like if I want to let my kids play among us but not GTA, a pop up on the phone app when the game is attempted to be opened on the Xbox saying: “grant all permissions, custom permissions or deny for (insert game)” would make this 1000 times easier. Will update rating when app is better but knowing Microsoft menus… I don’t think that’s going to happen.

I just discovered this app about a week ago and am really liking it. I’ve only used it a few days, but one suggestion I have is it would be great if a custom screen time extension when adding more time. I’m still trying to figure out how to pause the time for them. For example, if I let my son play for 4 hours in a day and I called him to come to dinner before the 4 hour time limit is up, the counter continues to count on. And if the time expires while we’re eating dinner then I need to add more time manually afterwards. Maybe there is a way around this (do you have to turn the Xbox off?), but I haven’t figured it out yet.