What independent tests have actually measured

This page is a map of what published independent tests of parental-control apps have measured, and what they have not.

The map is short. Most of the parent purchase journey runs on product marketing, not on test data.

Definition

An independent test of a parental-control app is a published comparison carried out by a body that:

• is not employed by, paid by, or otherwise financially tied to the product it is testing;
• publishes the methodology before the results are known;
• publishes a scale the reader can use to compare products;
• publishes the date the test was run and the date the report shipped.

Stiftung Warentest in Germany and AV-TEST, a technical lab based in Germany, are the two institutions that meet these criteria across the German and English-language coverage [source: test-warentest-2020] [source: www-avtest-2017-16apps].

K-Tipp in Switzerland has tested adjacent hardware — children’s GPS smartwatches — but has not published a comparative test of parental-control apps as of the latest check [source: www-ktipp-tests-overview].

No Which? (UK), Kassensturz (CH-TV), or eSafety (AU) comparative ranking of named parental-control apps was found; eSafety publishes a generic parent checklist, not a test [source: www-ktipp-tests-overview].

This is the documented universe. Two institutional testers, with different scope, on a category that most other consumer-protection bodies leave to affiliate-listed listicles.

Scope

This page covers what Stiftung Warentest and AV-TEST have measured, how, when, and on what products.

It does not cover the operating-system tools that ship with iOS or Android. The OS tools are tested separately by the same bodies and on similar products, but the methodology differs.

It does not cover the category of “best of” reviews on affiliate listicles. Those reviews do not meet the definition above. They are documented in the underlying research note [source: klicksafe-warentest-summary].

What Stiftung Warentest measured

Stiftung Warentest’s most recent full comparative test was published in August 2020 and is still cited in 2025–2026 secondary coverage. The test ran four weighted criteria on nine products [source: test-warentest-2020] [source: www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary]:

• Function scope (35 %)
• Family orientation (30 %)
• Pedagogical support (25 %)
• Basic data protection (10 %)

The scale was the German school-grade scale, 0.5 to 5.5, with lower being better.

Four documented findings:

• Two products scored “gut” (“good”): Salfeld Kindersicherung and JusProg. Salfeld scored 2.0 overall, the lowest grade in the test and the only product on the “gut” line [source: test-warentest-2020] [source: www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary].
• One product was worst in test: Wondershare FamiSafe was rated “ausreichend” (sufficient) and was explicitly compared to spyware by the testers for the depth of its chat, photo, and location access [source: www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary].
• Apple’s iOS tools scored 2.9 overall (“befriedigend”, satisfactory), with a 5.4 (“mangelhaft”, poor) on pedagogical support and a privacy statement the testers rated “lückenhaft” (patchy) [source: test-de-ios-detail].
• Google Family Link scored “befriedigend” [source: www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary].

The 2020 test is the most recent full comparative test of the category from Stiftung Warentest. Secondary coverage in 2024 and 2025 confirms it is still cited as the current reference [source: www-mdr-warentest-context] [source: www-familie-de-warentest-summary] [source: klicksafe-warentest-summary].

The 2020 test is now five years old as of the latest republication of its findings. The product versions and privacy statements may have changed. A full re-test of the category has not been published [source: www-mdr-warentest-context].

In 2025, Stiftung Warentest and SWR co-published a separate bypass test of Apple Screen Time. Their finding: time-limit restrictions in normal mode worked “recht gut” (fairly well), and the Accessibility “unterstützender Zugriff” mode bypassed several restrictions in ways a child could replicate [source: www-warentest-ios-bypass-2025].

A separate 2025 Stiftung Warentest risk article, “Kinderschutz-Apps: Kinderüberwachung mit Risiken”, catalogued the structural privacy risks of the category as a regulator sees them [source: test-de-2025-risks].

What AV-TEST measured

AV-TEST runs an annual block-rate certification for parental- control apps. The 2026 program tested a 7,500-site corpus across Windows 11, Android 12, and iOS 16, measuring both under- and over-blocking [source: www-avtest-kaspersky-2026-pdf].

The 2023 program tested the same vendor against a similar corpus [source: www-avtest-2023-pdf].

Documented findings:

• Kaspersky Safe Kids has held APPROVED certification continuously since 2017, including 2023 (92 % Windows / 88 % Android block rate, 100 %/~100 % adult content) and 2026 (93 % Windows / 86 % Android, 98.6 %/96.6 % adult content) [source: www-avtest-2023-pdf] [source: www-avtest-kaspersky-2026-pdf].

• Norton Family held APPROVED certification in 2017 and 2018, the only other vendor in the AV-TEST series to have done so on both Android and iOS [source: www-avtest-2017-16apps] [source: www-avtest-2018-multi].

  No current AV-TEST APPROVED certificate for Norton Family has been published since 2018. The vendor’s filter status is not “good” — it is unknown at the certification level.

• Qustodio, Bark, FamiSafe, Boomerang, OurPact, and ESET have never appeared in an AV-TEST or AV-Comparatives APPROVED certification report [source: www-avtest-2018-multi].

The AV-TEST methodology covers URL filtering. It does not cover message-content monitoring, panic-button reliability, app-blocking fidelity, geofencing accuracy, or location cadence.

What the independent tests did not measure

The most important gap to know about is the one nobody has filled.

Motivated-child bypass scenarios. The 2020 Stiftung Warentest test and the AV-TEST certification series both test the product as installed by a parent. Neither test simulates a child who signs out of the family configuration, uses a friend’s device, or actively tries to defeat the control [source: test-warentest-2020] [source: www-avtest-2017-16apps].

The 2025 Stiftung Warentest / SWR bypass test is a partial exception, but it covers Apple’s built-in controls, not the third-party apps [source: www-warentest-ios-bypass-2025].

A parent forum thread that asks “is there ANY screen time app a 14-year-old can’t bypass” has no published answer in the test catalog searched [source: klicksafe-warentest-summary].

iOS / Android feature parity. The vendor pages commonly list a single feature set for “Android and iOS”. The published test catalog does not separate the platforms product by product, so the parent’s question — “what does this app do on my child’s device” — is not answered by the test bodies [source: wirecutter-parental-controls].

Message-content monitoring. No test body has published a methodology that compares message-monitoring accuracy across vendors. The feature is sold on the strength of “AI” claims. The independent record on this category is empty [source: www-avtest-2018-multi].

Location accuracy and refresh rate. No test body has published a side-by-side comparison of location accuracy, refresh cadence, or false-alarm rate across vendors. What is and is not “real-time” is, in practice, a vendor claim [source: ourpact-techcrunch-2019].

Long-term protection. Both the 2020 Stiftung Warentest test and the AV-TEST program measure a single product version on a single date. Neither measures the product’s behaviour a year later under the same criteria [source: www-mdr-warentest-context].

What lies outside the independent test catalog

Some claims made about parental-control apps are repeated widely and tested nowhere.

• “AI-powered” content scanning — claimed by multiple vendors, not tested by any of the test bodies in the coverage [source: www-avtest-2018-multi].
• “Real-time monitoring” — claimed by multiple vendors, not tested by any of the test bodies in the coverage [source: ourpact-techcrunch-2019].
• Panic-button reliability — claimed by vendors, not tested for response time, false-alarm rate, or behaviour under stress [source: www-avtest-2018-multi].

The K-Tipp / Compass Security 2025 test of children’s GPS smartwatches is the closest the wider category comes to a security-focused test of hardware used by children. 8 of 11 watches failed security checks; 6 could be covertly used to eavesdrop; 1 allowed covert video capture [source: www-srf-smartwatches].

That is a sibling category, not the parental-control app category. The same test body has not extended the methodology to the apps.

A 2019 K-Tipp test of children’s tablets is the only other child-focused K-Tipp product test in the recent archive. It is hardware, not apps [source: www-ktipp-tablets-2019].

What sits in the broader regulatory landscape

Regulators outside the test bodies have weighed in on the category, in ways that bound what a parent can rely on.

• The U.S. Federal Trade Commission treats parental controls as one layer of protection, not a complete solution [source: consumer-ftc-parental-controls].
• The Austrian Safer Internet Centre describes four layers where technical child protection can be configured: OS-level tools, ISP or mobile-carrier add-ons, third-party apps, and in-app or browser settings [source: saferinternet-technischer-kinderschutz].
• The Coalition Against Stalkerware draws the line between parental-control software and stalkerware at covert installation and non-consensual monitoring [source: stopstalkerware-coalition-stalkerware-en].

These are not test results. They are framework statements that sit above the test catalog and constrain what any product can correctly claim to do.

What “no current independent test” means in practice

For most products in this category, no published independent test exists. The list of products without a current test is longer than the list of products with one.

The practical answer for a parent is not “the rating is bad”. It is that the rating they are reading is the vendor’s own rating, or a review outlet’s rating, not a test body’s rating.

Theurer Warentest’s 2020 headline — “only two of nine products schützen Kinder wirklich” — is not worn off by the fact that the test is five years old. It is the most recent full comparative test found. A re-test of the category has not been published [source: www-mdr-warentest-context] [source: klicksafe-warentest-summary].

The honest summary: the URL filter category has been tested annually by one lab, on one product family; the OS-tools category was tested once in 2020 and has not been fully re-tested; the message-monitoring category has not been tested by any of the bodies searched.

Sources

Independent, methodology-disclosed tests and institutional sources:

• test-warentest-2020 — Stiftung Warentest, “Kinderschutz-Apps im Test: Nur zwei Apps helfen Eltern gut” (2020-08-24, recapped in 2026; full test paywalled).
• www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary — Independent secondary summary of the 2020 test, with the “spyware” comparison for FamiSafe.
• test-de-ios-detail — Stiftung Warentest detail page for Apple iOS in the 2020 comparison.
• www-familie-de-warentest-summary — Familie.de secondary coverage of the 2020 test, with the methodology description.
• www-ntv-warentest-2020 — n-tv secondary reporting of the 2020 results.
• www-mdr-warentest-context — MDR context reporting confirming that the 2020 test is still cited as the current reference in 2024.
• klicksafe-warentest-summary — Klicksafe (EU Safer Internet DE) coverage of the 2020 test, with the parental-tool-use statistic and the “Testsieger ohne Methodik” structural critique.
• www-avtest-2017-16apps — AV-TEST, “16 Parental Control Apps for Android & Apple iOS” (2017-08-27), the multi-vendor comparison that established the APPROVED certificate.
• www-avtest-2018-multi — AV-TEST, “Test: Parental Control Apps for Google Android, Apple iOS & Amazon Fire OS” (2018-12-15). Only Kaspersky Safe Kids and Norton Family passed full APPROVED at that time.
• www-avtest-2023-pdf — AV-TEST Parental Test 2023 PDF for Kaspersky Safe Kids Premium.
• www-avtest-kaspersky-2026-pdf — AV-TEST Parental Test 2026 PDF for Kaspersky Safe Kids, the most recent APPROVED certificate.
• www-avtest-kaspersky-pr — Herstellernahe pressemeldung with AV-TEST / AV-Comparatives zitaten (treated as a secondary source, not a primary test report).
• www-ktipp-tests-overview — K-Tipp product-test index, used to confirm that no parental-control app test has been published.
• www-srf-smartwatches — SRF secondary reporting of the K-Tipp / Compass Security 2025 children’s-smartwatch test.
• www-ktipp-tablets-2019 — K-Tipp 2019 children’s tablets test (hardware, not apps).
• www-warentest-ios-bypass-2025 — Secondary reporting on the Stiftung Warentest / SWR 2025 bypass test of Apple Screen Time.
• test-de-2025-risks — Stiftung Warentest, “Kinderschutz- Apps: Kinderüberwachung mit Risiken” (2025-04-13), the institutional risk-overview update.

Structural sources cited as evidence for platform limits:

• [source: ourpact-appleinsider-2019] — AppleInsider, “Apple returns parental control app OurPact to App Store” (2019-07-11).
• [source: ourpact-techcrunch-2019] — TechCrunch, confirmation of the structural iOS API limitation behind the 2019 purge and restoration.
• [source: www-jusprog-hintergrund] — JusProg e.V., “Hintergrund”, the §11 JMStV state-recognised status of the non-profit Jugendschutzprogramm.
• [source: www-jusprog-faq] — JusProg e.V., FAQ, confirming the free / member-funded model.

Security findings:

• [source: famisafe-cve-sentinelone] — SentinelOne vulnerability database entry for CVE-2022-50902.

The following sources were reviewed during the research and are deliberately not cited on this page, because they publish star ratings or “best of” rankings without a published methodology: review listicles on Safewise, TechRadar, PCMag, Airdroid, SafetyMode, TechSafeForKids, HyperJar, Kidgy-forum, Phone-Safety. They are documented in the underlying research note RAW/research/f-third-party-tests.md and excluded here by editorial policy.

[source: test-warentest-2020] [source: www-familienhandbuch-warentest-summary] [source: test-de-ios-detail] [source: www-familie-de-warentest-summary] [source: www-ntv-warentest-2020] [source: www-mdr-warentest-context] [source: klicksafe-warentest-summary] [source: www-avtest-2017-16apps] [source: www-avtest-2018-multi] [source: www-avtest-2023-pdf] [source: www-avtest-kaspersky-2026-pdf] [source: www-avtest-kaspersky-pr] [source: www-ktipp-tests-overview] [source: www-srf-smartwatches] [source: www-ktipp-tablets-2019] [source: www-warentest-ios-bypass-2025] [source: test-de-2025-risks] [source: ourpact-appleinsider-2019] [source: ourpact-techcrunch-2019] [source: www-jusprog-hintergrund] [source: www-jusprog-faq] [source: famisafe-cve-sentinelone]