SafePlay Kids is on Google Play

SafePlay Kids, the child-side app of SafePlay (which we make), is now on Google Play for phones and tablets in the UK, Ireland and the United States. It plays only the YouTube channels you have approved, per child, in YouTube's own player. This post says what you get today, what is free, how to set it up, and where iPhone and iPad stand.

What the app does#

Your child opens SafePlay Kids and sees big picture tiles, one per channel you approved. They tap a channel, tap a video, and it plays. There is no search box, no recommendations, no comments and no autoplay into something you have never seen. Shorts are blocked for a new profile unless you allow them on a particular channel. When the daily time budget you set runs out, the app shows a single "Ask for more time" button, and you say yes or no from your phone.

Children never sign in to anything. You pair the device once from your parent account, set a grown-ups PIN, and hand it over. Your account is not kept on the device.

Two things are worth saying plainly. Videos play in YouTube's embedded player, which we leave exactly as YouTube provides it. That means an advert YouTube attaches to a video can still appear; there are no ads from SafePlay, ever. It also means YouTube's own logo and "Watch on YouTube" link are present. Tapping one pauses the video and asks for the grown-ups PIN; without it, nothing opens. With it, the video opens in the YouTube app, which is a sensible thing for a parent to be able to do and the wrong thing for a six-year-old to do alone.

What is free#

The free plan covers one child and eight approved channels, and every control in the app comes with it: the whitelist itself, Strict Mode (new uploads from a trusted channel wait for your OK), the per-child Shorts block, daily time budgets and "ask for more time". Watch history is kept for 14 days so you can see what was watched.

The Family plan, £5.99 a month or £49.99 a year with a seven-day trial, is for families who need more room: up to five children, 100 channels each, full watch history, a weekly email digest and AI safety grades on the channels you have approved. Plans are managed on the parent dashboard on the web. There is nothing to buy inside the app, and no prompt to upgrade in it either; a child's screen should not be a shop.

Set-up takes about ten minutes#

Create a parent account on the web, add a child, approve a handful of channels (preview what each one actually posts before you say yes), decide on Strict Mode and Shorts, set a time budget, then install the app on your child's device and pair it. Set up SafePlay in ten minutes walks through every step with the exact buttons.

If you are choosing your first channels and want a starting point, our list of calm, educational YouTube channels groups 25 of them by age with a note on how fast-paced each one is. Eight well-chosen channels beat eighty half-checked ones; whitelist or blocklist explains why the small list is the safer one.

iPhone and iPad#

The iOS app is finished and is with Apple's App Review at the time of writing. We would rather not guess at a date, because the last two months have taught us not to. As soon as it is approved, the site, this post and the set-up guide will say so, and everything you have set up on the dashboard will work on both platforms with no changes.

If your child's device is an iPad today, you can still do all the preparation now: the account, the child profiles, the channels and the time budgets live on the web and will be waiting.

Why it works this way#

SafePlay is built by a parent in Edinburgh who works in the NHS. He wanted his children to have the good bits of YouTube without the rabbit hole, and could not find an app that simply played the channels he had chosen, so he built one. The design follows from that: an allow-list rather than a filter, because a filter has to guess; controls on the parent's side rather than the child's, because a child should not be asked to make privacy decisions; and as little data as possible, because a children's app should not need much. The privacy policy lists exactly what is stored.

It is a smaller catalogue than YouTube, on purpose. You will hear "can I watch this?" more often than you do now. That is the trade, and we think it is a good one.

What's next#

We will keep adding to the blog on the practical questions parents ask: how much screen time is reasonable by age, what YouTube's own controls do and do not cover, and how to talk to a child about the channels they want. If you have a question the app or the guides do not answer, the support page has a real mailbox at the bottom, and it is read every day.

For the full picture of what YouTube's settings cover before you decide what you need, start with how to make YouTube safe for kids.