LivingRoom vs Covenant Eyes on iPhone

If you are a parent trying to ensure a child is using an iPhone safely, or an accountability partner helping an adult with addiction, you might have considered using an app to monitor and proactively restrict inappropriate content on iOS. We've closely examined alternatives to LivingRoom on iPhone in an effort to help you decide which solution is the right fit for you. In this comparison, we'll focus on the Covenant Eyes iPhone app.

About Covenant Eyes on iOS

Covenant Eyes on iPhone provides a mix of monitoring and proactive blocking features. If you've read a Covenant Eyes iPhone review, you'll see that this app uses a VPN to block adult websites and also uses a Safari extension to capture screenshots of activity in the Safari app. If Covenant Eyes captures a screenshot of inappropriate content accessed in Safari, an accountability partner can be notified with a blurred image of the content that was viewed. Covenant Eyes will also attempt to notify the accountability partner of certain bypass attempts, like turning off the VPN or deleting the app.

Why was LivingRoom created when there are apps like Covenant Eyes?

You might be wondering, why even bother creating an alternative to Covenant Eyes on iPhone?

As parents ourselves, we realized that many of these apps don't provide a clear picture of what kids are actually seeing. Furthermore, parental monitoring and accountability apps for iOS are notorious for having numerous monitoring gaps and ways to be bypassed (without a parent or accountability partner detecting anything is wrong).

For Covenant Eyes on iPhone, these are our main concerns with the app:

Significant gaps with Screenshot-based monitoring

We firmly believe that monitoring with screenshots is the best approach for parents and accountability partners on iOS. There's no need to sift through a large list of website URLs and try to guess if something problematic is being accessed — screenshots remove all ambiguity around what is actually being looked at.

But with Covenant Eyes, the best feature of the app is limited to Safari only. There are so many apps that warrant monitoring, not just Safari, and a common bypass technique involves using an unmonitored browser like Chrome to evade Covenant Eyes screenshot monitoring. Even if you lock down the iPhone or iPad to only a few safe apps, you can't be sure that an in-app browser isn't being used to access the web without any oversight. There are also techniques for accessing inappropriate content that don't involve the use of an app. For example, GIFs in iMessage and Spotlight search can show inappropriate content.

DNS-based website blocking is far from perfect

Covenant Eyes uses DNS-based blocking to restrict access to adult websites. But as you'll quickly discover, this system is far from perfect. Some websites will inevitably slip through detection and not be blocked. There are also “mixed content” and social websites that have subsections dedicated to inappropriate content, but are categorized as “Message Boards & Forums” or “Social Networking” by DNS blocking services.

This is where the screenshot-based monitoring is a useful fallback. However, as discussed above, that assumes the Safari browser is used and that the person hasn't figured out about the screenshot monitoring gaps.

Why LivingRoom?

The LivingRoom app has a simple, but incredibly effective design: all apps on the devices (other than always allowed apps) are blocked until the LivingRoom screen recorder is started. Then, the LivingRoom app records the full screen and periodically takes screenshots of what is being looked at, no matter what app is being used. Simultaneously, the LivingRoom app detects any nudity on the screen and blocks the responsible app.

The key difference is that LivingRoom's screenshot monitoring works across all apps, so a parent or accountability partner sees everything.

The on-device nudity detection and blocking feature is more comprehensive and flexible compared to DNS-based blocking. This approach handles mixed content websites and other apps, not just Safari.