The app stays the app. A few specific things are withdrawn, and the switches sit behind a passcode — because a restriction a child can lift is one that lasts until they think to try.
There are three controls. Two of them the app enforces outright. The third asks the model to behave, which is a weaker thing, and this page says which is which rather than gathering all three under “safe for kids”. A family deciding how much to rely on this needs to know where the hard edges are before they rely on it.
Turn off web search
Enforced by the appReplies come from the model alone, with no live results from the open web.
This one is absolute. The request to search is not made, so there is nothing to filter and nothing to get wrong — the model answers from what it already knows or it does not answer.
Turn off image generation
Enforced by the appAsking for a picture gets a short explanation instead of one.
Also absolute, and it fails in the direction you want: a child who asks is told the feature is off, rather than being handed something that slipped through.
Age-appropriate replies
Asked of the modelAsks the model to keep to suitable ground. An instruction, not a wall — a determined reader can still push at it.
This is the one to be clear-eyed about. It is an instruction added to every request, and instructions are followed most of the time rather than all of the time. It raises the floor. It is not a filter, and anyone who has watched a teenager work at something will know the difference.
Why the passcode is only a passcode
The switches are gated by four digits. That stops a child. It does not stop an adversary, and it is not meant to — Screen Time makes exactly the same trade, and for the same reason: the threat being answered is a nine-year-old with your phone, not an attacker with your device and time to spend on it.
The passcode gates the settings. It is not a key and it does not protect your data; the encryption that does that is unrelated and always on.
Kept on the device, not on the account
These settings belong to the machine they are set on, the way Screen Time does. That is deliberate. Syncing them to the account would mean a parent’s phone silently changing what a shared family computer allows — and the family laptop and the parent’s phone are not the same situation, so they should not be forced to agree.
The practical consequence is worth stating plainly: turning these on for one device turns them on for that device only. Each machine a child uses needs setting up.
What this is not
It is not parental controls in the sense of a monitored account, a report of what was asked, or a log a parent can read later. Nothing here shows you your child’s conversations. That would need us to be able to read them, and the encryption that makes this app worth using is the reason we cannot.
So the honest summary is narrow, which is the only kind worth printing: two capabilities can be removed outright, one behaviour can be asked for, and a passcode keeps a child from undoing any of it.