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

How does the supervisor model actually work?

There are two halves to it: a protection app on your phone running with Device Owner privilege, which is the highest administrative privilege Android grants, and the supervisor app (or its website) on your friend's phone. 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 and be clear about the role: the key to the blocking is going to be with him, not with you, and he is the one who decides when a block comes off.
2. Your friend creates a supervisor account from the supervisor app or website. One account manages more than one device, sorted into groups, so if he supervises you and someone else it is all handled from the same place.
3. Provision your phone: Device Owner privilege is granted from a QR code on the install page, on a new device or after a factory reset. If your phone has your data on it, back it up first with the backup before installing guide.
4. Bind the device to your friend's supervisor account. From that moment every rule is managed from his side.
5. Activate the subscription: 200 EGP a month or 2,000 EGP a year for the device, with a second device on the same payer at 150 and the third and beyond at 100 EGP a month. Payment is electronic, by card and wallet, 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.

Can your friend hold the computer as well?

The same supervisor account covers Windows. Tabaa for PC runs as a system service that starts before anyone signs in, comes back on its own within seconds if it is stopped, has a watchdog checking on it every minute, and keeps its program files owned by the system account with the lock re-applied every twenty seconds. And the part that matters most to the idea we are describing here: removing the program requires the supervisor's password, verified against the server at the moment of removal rather than stored on the machine, and the same password is required if anyone tries to install a copy over the existing one. If someone tries and gets it wrong, the supervisor sees the attempt on his dashboard.

Also: the rules keep working with no internet, and time is measured by a clock that only moves forward and is referenced to the Tabaa server's time, so moving the machine's clock forward earns no extra minutes and does not walk you past bedtime. And the browser extension blocks part of a site instead of the whole site: YouTube Shorts blocked, YouTube still working. The price is 100 EGP a month or 1,000 EGP a year for the computer, and 300 EGP a month or 3,000 EGP a year for both together. Details on the Windows page.

And if there is nobody I trust?

It does not have to be a friend: a relative, an older brother, a wife, anyone whose commitment you trust. And if there is genuinely nobody, there is the "make us the supervisor" service: the Tabaa team takes the supervisor role around the clock and holds the key instead of you. We also have a full guide to the best Arabic-language porn blocker for adults, and if this is about your children rather than about you, the guide on parental controls in Egypt is the one you want.