YouTube Kids – Safe Video Hosting for Children [Free]

Modern children quickly get used to smartphones, tablets, the Internet … in a word, already at the age of 5 they are ready to communicate with the digital world. Another thing is that this digital world is not painfully ready for children: for completely harmless requests Google it may well give out content that will make parents' hair stand on end. That is why many browsers have safe modes (which, of course, do not exclude unwanted content, but for the most part do their job. YouTube does not lag behind Safari with Chrome in terms of the safety of small users: an application is available in App Store YouTube Kids. Let's see how effective it is! The peculiarity of the application is that it has two interfaces: parent and child. To enter parent mode, you must enter numbers on the on-screen keyboard, which are written in words to prove that you are already an adult . The numbers change every time, so you won't be able to google the answer. In case the child already knows how to read and knows the numbers, it is possible to set a permanent password. After making sure that it is dealing with an adult, the application prompts you to choose which video category you want to show your children. There is a category for the preschool level and the school level – it is assumed that the second category includes primary school students. They differ in the level of complexity of the content in the sections of training and educational videos. Also at this stage you can enable or disable search in the application. If you turn off the search bar, you will have to settle for only the recommended channels, each of which is 100% safe. For the sake of fairness, it should be noted that even when asking various provocative requests, it was not possible to find a video of an inappropriate age category in the requests: the content filter works as it should. Therefore, you can add a search option without much hesitation: the child will not see anything rated. Another useful feature is the timer. You can start a session of a specific duration (range from 1 to 120 minutes) and a bar will appear at the top of the screen showing the amount of time remaining. At the end of the session, the screen will be locked. In order to continue using the applications, you must again pass the test with numbers or enter the set password. After unlocking, the session will resume from the same moment at which it was interrupted. There are perhaps two downsides here. Firstly, even in silent mode, when the application is turned on, music plays during the animated splash screen, which is somewhat annoying. Secondly, advertising. Short 15-second commercials periodically appear before watching the video, but even the ads are frankly childish: these are colorful animated previews of various children's channels and, often, ads for YouTube Kids itself. In general, the application definitely deserves the attention of every parent: everything in it is tailored for a child audience, it looks good, and most importantly, the content filter works perfectly.