How do I get a friend to supervise my phone and block porn for me?

How does the supervisor model work here?

This route uses two Tabaa products: Tabaa Children on your own phone, with Device Owner privilege, the highest administrative privilege Android grants, and the supervisor app on your friend's phone. Tabaa Adults has no supervisor at all, so it is not the app you install here. The essential difference is that the blocking here is carried out by the operating system itself: disallowed apps are suspended at system level, so the block holds on any launcher, for any user on the phone, on Wi-Fi and on mobile data alike, with any SIM, and whether or not a Google account is signed in. Why that particular privilege is what prevents deletion is explained in full in the What is Device Owner guide.

And because the blocking comes from the system, Tabaa needs no Accessibility service, no notification-reader service and no VPN on the phone. Nothing sits there reading your screen in order to block. That is a practical point rather than a theoretical one: some banking and payment apps limit what they will do on a device where another app holds the Accessibility permission, because that is the same permission banking-fraud software abuses. Tabaa never asks for it, so there is nothing on your phone for an app like that to object to.

Speed is part of the idea too. A blocked app closes within about a third of a second of being opened, any change your friend makes reaches the device in about three seconds, and instantly once the push notification fires, because the server wakes the phone rather than waiting for the next round. And if an app was already open at the moment it got blocked, it closes in that same moment.

What are the steps, in order?

1. Agree it with your friend: the blocking key will be with him, and he is the one who lifts any block.
2. Your friend installs the supervisor app from Google Play and creates an account. One account manages more than one device.
3. You install Tabaa Children on your phone from a computer over the charging cable, with no factory reset. That is the app that works with a supervisor; Tabaa Adults has none.
4. Bind your phone to your friend's account. From here every rule comes from his side.
5. Activate the subscription: monthly or yearly in Egyptian pounds, and the details are on the pricing page.

What is in the supervisor's hands, and what is in yours?

One thing has to be said plainly: the supervisor does see your per-app usage reports, and the device's last location with a short trail on a map. So choose someone you genuinely trust, and agree the boundaries between you from the start: what gets blocked, when a block comes off, and what the commitment is between the two of you.

Why the supervisor's role here is not decorative

Any blocker you can take off yourself turns your supervisor into a spectator: he watches a report, and you make the decision. What makes your friend's role real in Tabaa is that all of these locks sit at device level rather than app level:

• There is no hidden space on the phone. The work-profile lock is active on every supported Android version, the cloned-apps and private-space locks apply on Android 15 and above, and Xiaomi's Second space is really an additional Android user, so the lock on adding and switching users covers it on every version. All three are on by default.
• Filtering at system level, not browser level. Tabaa pins Private DNS to the Tabaa server and locks that setting, so every DNS query on the device passes through it: the browser, the in-app browser that opens inside a game or a chat app, and apps running in the background. Nothing has to integrate with Tabaa in order to be filtered. This filtering needs Android 9 or newer.
• 47 VPN, Tor, proxy and DNS-changer apps are blocked in every mode, and are suspended even when they came preinstalled on the device.
• The default list is audited by hand. 32 apps are blocked by default, 11 of them unofficial forks of Telegram, because blocking the official app alone means nothing if a fork gets through. That audit also removed blocks that were doing harm: search engines like Bing and DuckDuckGo were unblocked, because blocking a search engine breaks the pinning of safe search and pushes the user towards an engine with no filtering at all.
• The protection works with no internet. The policy is stored on the device, and so is the strict-lock countdown, so cutting the network is not a way out.
• Updates happen on their own. Any improvement to the protection reaches every device with no step from anyone and without going through a store.

The modes themselves are four, in a fixed order of priority: Strict focus, then Sleep, then Study, then Normal. Sleep and Study are daily windows in which only the apps the supervisor chose for that window will open. Strict focus is a full-screen countdown: nothing opens while it runs, not even calls. The system itself pins the screen, the lock resumes after a reboot, and it works with no network because its end time is stored on the device. The window is measured by the device clock, and the clock is pinned automatically to network time for as long as any mode is running.

And one last thing people ask about constantly: Tabaa does not touch Google accounts. Sign in with as many as you like. The protection is bound to the device itself rather than to an account, so adding one or switching one changes nothing about it.

Accountability by report, or accountability by holding the key?

Foreign accountability apps such as Ever Accountable are genuinely strong on the reporting side: your partner sees reports on how you use the device, and for some people that is a real deterrent on its own. But the decision to actually block stays in your hands, because the app depends on Android's Accessibility service - documented on their own site - and the Accessibility service is switched on and off from the device's own settings. Their site and their support are in English.

BlockerX describes the same mechanism itself. Its Google Play listing says that when you delete the app from your device, they send a notification to your accountability partner that you deleted BlockerX. And the FAQ page on its site sets the removal out in words: device settings, then device administrators, then turn off BlockerX's privilege, then delete the app. Which means your partner is told after the door has already opened, not before. BlockerX also states in its own description that it takes the Accessibility service, the draw-over-other-apps permission and a VPN on the device; the download from the store is free with in-app purchases, installation is instant, and there is an iOS version, all of which are real points in its favour.

In Tabaa your friend does not only see, he is the one who prevents: the blocking itself is in his hands, and removal takes a factory reset whose key is with him. The detailed comparisons are in Tabaa or Ever Accountable and Tabaa or BlockerX, and a wider comparison of every solution is in Arabic and foreign porn blockers compared.

And the PC?

Tabaa Desktop for Windows is a separate product with no supervisor: you are the one who blocks sites, programs, folders and browser extensions, and you can commit yourself to any item for a term or for good so it does not come off early. Removal takes a password you set yourself, and if you want your friend to hold the key, let him be the one who types it. The blocking works with no internet. Details on the Tabaa Desktop page.

And if there is nobody I trust?

You do not need anyone. Tabaa Adults blocks pornography from the first minute and does not let you lift it, and anything you add and make mandatory you cannot go back on either. And if this is about your children rather than about you, it belongs with Tabaa Children and the guide on parental controls in Egypt.