Verizon Smart Family - Parent

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My oldest brought this to my attention today, we have Spectrum for our internet provider since the cellular coverage in our house is garbage. Needless to say it was easy for them to see a difference once I had gotten the VPN set up, we figured out that once the device successfully connects to a WiFi network while still connected to Cellular data, it doesn’t just keep the connection to the VPN server, it completely pauses the Cellular connection to the server, restricting everything (requiring WiFi) and attempts to connect through the new network before lifting the “lockdown.” This process is incredibly lengthy, taking 7-10 minutes on average, which for the quality of our internet provider makes absolutely no sense, every device without the VPN connects to the WiFi just fine and has pages loaded in a split second, so why should it take nearly 10 minutes to connect to the VPN server? And to add insult to injury it occasionally goes on “lockdown” seemingly at random, forcing the process to restart (I can only assume because of a stutter in the WiFi causing a brief moment where connection to the VPN server faltered). This apparently has frustrated my kids since we got the VPN a month ago but up until today we hadn’t tested to see if the VPN and the WiFi cutouts were connected. I can’t believe I paid for this to begin with, and will be taking my kids off this plan when we make our next monthly payment unless this issues are addressed.

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It is utterly awful! Seriously, for instance with the time restrictions, you can’t even tell what you’re restricting. Is the time that you restrict the time the phone is off, or on? You really have no way of knowing, until you do it, and then your kid complains, or not. It actually says “set custom hours“ and then has a start time and stop time. That’s it! What does that mean!? Plus you can’t set different times for different nights, like different for weekdays and weekends, but who would ever want to do that? (Heavy sarcasm). Plus, you can set a limit on your kid’s data. But then it just shuts off! It doesn’t throttle down so they limited access to data. The purpose most people want is to limit their use so they only use their share and don’t use up all of the family plan, not cut them off completely when they reach their limit. That should obviously be an option. Unbelievable! But wait, there’s more! It doesn’t work and less you install an app on their phone! That’s idiotic! All they have to do is delete it! Of course there are ways to set up the phone so they can’t do that, But I shouldn’t have to. I really can’t believe someone with even a high school diploma could’ve come up with such an awful app. What’s even worse is they charge you 10 bucks a month for this awfulness when it should be included with your plan!

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Not accurate and unreliable, it crashes ALL THE TIME. I can’t even look at the call log for more than a minute before it just crashes and disappears, forcing me to start all over again. Good concept though, just sucky execution. Update- Almost a year later and still having the same issues. You think they’d invest a little in making the app work better, since, you know, it’s not a free service. Another update - well, they switched it to Verizon “smart family” for the first bit of time the app actually functioned. Now, every time I want to do anything it gives me error messages, so I can’t really accomplish what we are paying to be able to do. I wish there was a way to attach photos to these reviews. What are we paying for? Seriously need to invest in better developers or something. It looks terrible that such a well known company who specializes in communication technology can not even get an application to function correctly. I’m a trusted contact, yet I can’t get through during restriction periods (ie...school). I actually have to log into a computer when I want to change things. Isn’t the point of the app so that we don’t have to do that? I despise having to write bad reviews but this one seems to be a consistent problem. I just don’t get it. I feel like they really need to get their act together here, it looks terrible for them.

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Downloaded this app to monitor my teenage daughters calls, texts, location, etc. After I downloaded and signed in there was absolutely no directions or prompts to set up the app with my daughters’ phones so I could monitor them. Instead it gives me the option to monitor my own phone, place restrictions on my own phone, limit calls and texts on my own phone!??? Then I clicked on their “Help Center” and that proved to be just as useless and only showed grainy/blurry screenshots of what I should see in my app. I read the developer response to another review where they claim you don’t need to download the app on your child’s phone if you’re using LTE. Well guess what... there’s no option to add another phone within your family plan! I can only limit my own use as the only number that appeared in the app was my own. I fully expected to be greeted with some sort of setup wizard when I opened the app to add the numbers on my plan that I wanted to monitor. Instead they left me searching through their app with no direction to be able to connect to the other phones in my plan! I can’t believe they would expect someone to pay $10 a month for this useless app! Instead of being able to monitor my children’s’ activity, it just left me in the dark with no way of being able to do so. Complete waste of money!

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I’ve been using smart family ($5.00 version) for years but recently decided to pay for the upgraded version because of issues with my 16yo. I downloaded the necessary apps on both our phones. I set up all parameters to keep her from accessing certain apps and deleted those apps from her phone. But because the app was previously downloaded to her device, she just adds it back at will. She can not download new apps but can reinstall deleted ones. The time restrictions work well for us to limit her use on school nights. But I was already getting that with the cheaper version. The location settings are all messed up. My daughter hasn’t left our house in over 12 hours and I have 95 notifications telling me she has left her job which is two streets always from where we live. I am constantly getting notifications of her leaving home or leaving her work while she is sitting in the same room with me. I have the addresses for home, school and work loaded into the app but it doesn’t register properly. Why pay for the upgrade if it isn’t giving you accurate information? I upgraded my account so I could keep her from downloading certain apps, looking at harmful things on Safari and monitor her location at all times. This version of the app has not assisted with any of those things.