Per-child controls

Settings belong to the child, not to each parent. When a child has two parents, there's one set of toggles per child: any parent linked to the child can change them, and the other parent sees the same values straight away. One source of truth, no merging, no "whose rule wins?"

Open any child card to reveal:

  • Security: require login approval on/off, list of trusted devices, regenerate login code.
  • Chat features: image / emoji toggles, plus autocorrect, read receipts, typing indicators, and avatar permissions (see below).
  • Screen time: per-hour message limits and daily quiet hours (see below).
  • Mack: your child's on-phone AI safety guard: mode (Off / Hold for approval / Block), turn individual categories on or off, watchlist (see below).

Three supervision levels: you decide, not a birthday

There's no minimum age and no maximum age. Orbit's three levels aren't tied to how old your child actually is. They're about trust and readiness, not birthdays. You move between them when you feel your child is ready, because you know your child better than any age rule does. And it's never one-way: move up or down at any time as your judgement changes. Trust is something you grant at your own pace, not on a schedule someone else sets.

Level 1

Guarded

Full visibility

You see your child's entire chat history, and on-device moderation is active. For when your child is new to messaging and you want to see everything.

Level 2

Standard

Protected, with room to breathe

Moderation still protects them, but you step back. You see safety alerts and who they're talking to (their contacts), not every message. Your child gets real privacy while staying protected.

Level 3

Open

A normal, private account

No monitoring, no moderation: a completely private, normal messaging account. For when you trust them fully.

The choice is entirely yours

The names describe a journey of trust, not an age band. You grant more independence as your child earns it, and you can dial it back just as easily if anything changes. No schedule, no birthdays: your pace, your call.

Meet Mack, your child's AI safety guard, on the phone Beta

Mack has got your back. Mack is our AI safety guard, brand-new, built and trained by us, currently in Beta, and Mack lives on your child's phone, never in the cloud. Every message your child trades with another child, sent or received, is read by Mack on the phone itself: outgoing messages before they're sent, incoming messages right after the phone has unlocked them to be read. (Chats with you and the other trusted adults in the family aren't Mack's business, and the Open supervision level switches Mack off entirely.) We do both directions because another family's parents may have Mack set up differently from you, so your settings need to catch a harmful incoming message on your child's phone, not only on outgoing ones. The actual words never leave either phone. End-to-end encryption is not weakened, not bent, not "scanned around". This is the big difference from products like Bark that read messages on a server: we never see your child's messages, full stop. When Mack flags something, the flagged message travels to you sealed so only your phone can open it, and never to anyone else. Read the full Mack page →

Mack is trained on examples of how children actually message (phrases we wrote ourselves and ones from public sources), so Mack picks up the meaning, not just the words. Mack covers these categories:

  • Bullying and harassment
  • Hate speech
  • Sexual content and sexual solicitation
  • Scams and tricks
  • Sharing personal information (home address, phone number, etc.)
  • Self-harm
  • Suicidal thoughts

You tell Mack how to behave for each child:

  • Off: Mack still reads every message (crisis flags still fire), but nothing else triggers any action.
  • Hold for approval: a flagged message is paused on the phone: outgoing before it's sent, incoming before it's shown to your child. You get a push notification and can approve or reject it from your Orbit app. Pending requests expire in 24 hours.
  • Block: Mack stops flagged messages on the phone. Outgoing ones are stopped before they're sent, so your child sees a clear explanation and the message never goes. Incoming ones are stopped before your child sees them, with an alert to you.

Turn individual categories on or off

Within whichever mode you choose, you can tell Mack to ignore individual categories. If your child plays games where "free Robux" is just gaming chatter, you can turn off the scams category without affecting the others. The crisis categories, self-harm and suicidal thoughts, can't be turned off. Mack will always show the crisis card to the child and send an alert to you, whatever the mode.

Crisis safety net

When Mack flags a crisis category, three things happen at the same time:

  • Your child's screen shows a crisis card with UK helplines: Childline 0800 1111 and Samaritans 116 123.
  • You receive an urgent alert.
  • The message is sent to the person on the other end. Orbit does not silence a child reaching out for help. That's a deliberate choice, not a gap.

Telling us when Mack got it wrong

If you think Mack got it wrong, you can tap the alert and add a short note. Separately, there's an option to share that one message's wording with us to help us improve the next version of Mack. It's off unless you turn it on for that one message. If you do, everything that identifies your family is stripped off before the message reaches us: no name, no email, no chat name.

Why an AI on the phone, not a word list in the cloud?

Word lists need someone to write down every bad word in advance, including the slang your child used last week and the rephrasing they'll use next week. Miss one, and harmful messages get through. Catch too many, and innocent messages get stopped and your child gives up and finds somewhere less visible to chat. Mack is trained on how children actually talk, so Mack catches the meaning, not just the words. And because Mack runs on the phone, not on our servers, your child's messages never leave the phone for the safety check, whether Mack is looking at something they're about to send or something that's just arrived. Mack is a best guess, not perfect; Mack will sometimes miss things. Mack is a safety net, not a substitute for talking to your child.

Watchlist

Mack covers the general categories. The Watchlist lets you add your own words or phrases on top: a friend's name, an app you're worried about, a word like "vape" or "Snapchat". When one of your watchlist words turns up in a message your child sends or receives, you get a notification. The watchlist is notification-only: it never stops a message and never holds one. Think of it as a heads-up for conversations you might want to have. Like Mack, the watchlist check happens on the phone.

Chat-feature toggles

Text is always allowed. Everything else is opt-in, per child, per parent. Each toggle has a separate send and receive setting where it applies:

  • Image messages. Photo sharing, send and receive independently.
  • Emoji. Emoji-only messages, send and receive.
  • Read receipts. Whether the child's reads are surfaced to peers (and vice versa).
  • Typing indicators. Whether the child sees and emits "typing…" bubbles.
  • Autocorrect. Suppress the keyboard's autocorrect to encourage your child's spelling practice.
  • Profile photo permissions. Whether the child can change their own avatar, and whether they see their friends' avatars (initials shown instead).

Disallowed message types are blocked two ways:

  • On send. The child's app refuses to send a blocked type, with a friendly message explaining why.
  • On receive. If a blocked type slips in from a different family, the child sees a blurred placeholder: they can tell a message arrived, but they can't view the content.

Changes apply immediately to open sessions; the child doesn't need to relaunch.

Screen time & quiet hours

Simple knobs to slow things down without ending the conversation entirely:

  • Per-hour message limits. Cap how many messages a child can send and receive each hour. Once they hit the cap, further messages pause until the next hour rolls over. The child sees a friendly "paused until {time}" banner in the chat, and so does whoever is talking to them, so nobody thinks they're being ignored.
  • Daily quiet hours. Pick a start and end time. During quiet hours, push notifications to the child are silenced. Messages still arrive, they just don't ping the phone in the middle of the night.
  • Timeout. Need a pause right now? Pick a duration (30 minutes, 2 hours, 8 hours, a day, or your own) and Orbit locks on your child's phone immediately. They see a friendly screen telling them when it opens again; nothing is deleted and no conversation is lost.
  • Orbit lock schedule. The same lock, on a routine. Set each day of the week independently (say 07:00 to 16:00 on school days, a shorter window at the weekend, off entirely on a special day) and Orbit locks itself during those windows, in your child's local time, enforced on our servers so it holds even after a reinstall. Each day's window sits within that day (a start before an end); it locks Orbit only: the rest of the phone is untouched, and messages that arrive while it's locked are waiting when it opens.

The "ping the phone" master switch is also per-child: notifications stay off by default on a new child account, and a parent has to flip them on. Children only see the "turn on notifications" prompt once a parent has enabled it.

Like everything on this page, all of it is shared between parents: either of you can set a limit, start a timeout, or edit the schedule, and the other sees the same thing. And all of it is free, on every plan.

Alerts feed

Everything Mack flags, every message your child reports, every approval the parent owes, every login request, every avatar a child changes: it all rolls up into a single Alerts feed for the parent. Open it from the dashboard.

  • Aggregated across every child you're linked to.
  • Read state is per-parent: marking it read on your phone marks it read on your tablet too.
  • You choose how alerts reach you: push notification, email, or just the feed (plus an in-app toast while you're in the app).
  • Reports from your child always come through. When your child taps "I don't like this message" on something they've received, the alert lands here with the message, their chosen reason, and their note, readable only on your phone. It bypasses every filter preference and works even with Mack's filtering off, and the sender is never told. How reporting works →