Children are online, earlier than parents think
The leap to a personal device happens around the move from primary to secondary school. Once it does, the world of group chats, messaging, and social platforms opens up, long before most platforms' own minimum ages allow.
of 3-4-year-olds already use apps for messaging or video calls.
of 8-11-year-olds own a mobile phone. By age 12, that rises to 98%.
of 8-11s use social media, despite most platforms requiring users to be 13+.
of 8-11s have their own profile on TikTok and WhatsApp respectively.
All figures on this page are UK children, Ofcom's 2023 report (2022 fieldwork), except where noted.
Then visibility falls off a cliff
At 3-4 years old, two-thirds of parents sit with their child while they're online. By age 8-11, that has fallen to one in five. By the teens, most parents have moved to "talk to them" and "trust them to be sensible", neither of which is a tool.
of parents sit beside their child online: 65% at age 3-4, but only 22% by age 8-11.
of parents of 16-17-year-olds say they don't supervise their child online at all.
of parents use any third-party safety app on their child's device. The rest rely on built-in OS settings, or nothing.
of parents of 12-15s say their main safety strategy is "trust them to be sensible".
The risks aren't theoretical
The single number we find hardest to look past: more children are treated badly online than face-to-face. Messaging is now the main surface area of childhood social life, and it's the surface area where bullying, unwanted contact, and harmful content show up.
of 8-17-year-olds have had someone be nasty or hurtful to them via apps or platforms, more than the 20% who have face-to-face.
of 16-17-year-olds have experienced the same. For 12-15s it's 35%.
of 8-17-year-olds who game online play with people they don't know. 22% chat to them in-game.
of 8-17-year-olds have seen something worrying or nasty online in the last 12 months.
12-15-year-olds now spend 1h 24m per day on social media, more than the 1h 12m they spend with friends in person. They're the first age group where online time overtakes real-world friend time.
Parents know, and feel stuck
Concern is high. Confidence in the tools is low. Most parents we've spoken to describe the same loop: download a parental-control app, find it either nags constantly or sees nothing useful, give up, and fall back to trust.
of parents say the risks of their child using social media or messaging apps outweigh the benefits.
worry about their child being bullied online. 54% worry about it in games specifically.
are concerned about their child seeing age-inappropriate content; 73% about adult or sexual content.
worry about their child giving out personal details to inappropriate people online.
How Orbit is built differently
Each of the numbers above pointed us toward a design decision. Orbit isn't a parental-control product strapped onto a messaging app; it's a messaging app built from the safety side first.
Children on apps they shouldn't be on yet
Orbit is built around the family from the first screen. Children join through a parent: no email, no phone number, no public profile. The contacts list is the parents' contacts list. There's no "discover people" feed, no public usernames, no way for a stranger to type your child's name and find them. See parent controls →
Parents losing visibility as children get older
Orbit gives parents a structural layer, not a surveillance one. You always see who your child talks to (the contact list you co-built) and you get an alert when Mack flags something specific (bullying, sexual solicitation, signs of crisis). How much more you see is your call: three supervision levels run from reading everything while your child is new to messaging, to alerts-only, to fully private, and you move between them as trust grows. Children will trust the app, and us, only if the trust is real. Read our approach →
Bullying and strangers in messaging
Mack, our on-device AI safety guard, checks the messages your child trades with other children, before they send and after they arrive, on the phone itself. The words never reach our servers in readable form. Mack catches the patterns that word-lists miss: rephrased threats, slang, coercion, the early shape of grooming. When Mack flags something, the alert that leaves the phone carries the message sealed so only your phone can open it; we still can't read a word. Meet Mack →
Existing tools that don't really work
The 13% who use a third-party safety app, and quietly switch it off again, are the people we built this for. Orbit doesn't ask you to scan your child's messages on someone else's server. It doesn't ask for ID. It doesn't sell their data. And it never will. What Orbit will never be →
Be first to get it
Orbit is free to start: a real free plan, not a trial. Join the waitlist and we'll email you once, when the app and the first family-learning guides are ready.