Features
What obacht does today, on which devices, and what it can't do.
obacht is in early development. This page says what exists in the current code and how far each platform is.
Rules
- Daily time per category and per app, counted across all of a child's devices. Games a device or Steam reports as games are sorted into the games category by themselves.
- Schedules per weekday: bedtime, school hours, any time window, for all apps or some.
- Holidays and special days that follow another weekday's rules or skip school hours.
- App rules: block an app, always allow it (exempt from schedules and budgets), or give it its own daily limit.
- New apps wait for approval (a setting per child): an app nobody has decided on stays blocked until a parent allows it.
- Pause now blocks every device until a chosen time; a PC locks.
- Extra time: the child asks on their device, a parent answers from their phone. Parents can also give time without being asked.
- Warnings 10 and 2 minutes before an app gets blocked.
- Age presets (under 10, 10 to 13, 14 to 17) to start from.
- AI apps and chatbots have a category of their own; obacht never reads what a child asks. More about AI
What parents see
- Time used and left today, per category, app and device.
- History for the last 7 or 30 days, and when the screen was on and the device unlocked.
- Which app was used for how long, and when apps were opened: on by default, off per child.
- Nothing about what happens inside apps: no messages, pages, search terms, screenshots or location. The child sees the same on their own device.
- A weekly summary, and a notification when a device stops checking in.
Devices
| Platform | How far |
|---|---|
| Android phones and tablets | Working in development builds. Two variants: one for the Play Store (blocks through Android's accessibility service), one for family devices set up as managed (stronger: suspends apps, can't be uninstalled). |
| Windows | Built (a system service with a tray icon for the child); being tested on real PCs. |
| Steam | Experimental: playtime from a child's public Steam profile counts toward their limits. |
| Google TV | The Android app adapted for TVs; being tested. |
| Consoles, TVs and other devices | Early: through obacht's DNS filter (websites and online services, with time limits) and through UniFi routers (internet off at bedtime or when time is up). |
| Home Assistant | Early integration: screen time as sensors, pause and extra time from automations. |
| iPhone and iPad | On hold. Apple's rules make this a larger project; see the limitations. |
| Linux | Planned. |
What Google, Apple and others don't let obacht do, and the workarounds: Platform limitations.
For tinkerers
Everything the parent app does goes through obacht's documented API, so your own tools can too, with API tokens. Sign-in through your own identity provider (OpenID Connect) works as well.