Frequently asked questions

No. Guby is free while it is in early access. If that ever changes, anyone already using it will hear from us first, with plenty of notice.

A handful, and each does one clear job. The front camera estimates the distance to your child’s face. Permission to draw over other apps lets the owl appear on top of whatever is open. Usage access lets Guby read your overall screen time and the list of installed apps, so you can pick which ones it covers; it does not see what happens inside them. Notifications are simply so Guby can tell you when it is on duty or resting. And you can optionally let Guby skip battery optimisation, which stops the system closing it in the background and keeps it dependable. Nothing from the camera is ever recorded or sent off the device.

Android phones and tablets running Android 8.0 or newer, with a front camera. There is no iOS version; on iPhone, Apple’s built-in Screen Distance does a similar job.

No. The distance estimate happens live, on the device, and each frame is gone the next moment. Nothing is saved, uploaded, or shared, and there is no face recognition.

The idea is similar, keeping a screen a healthy distance from young eyes. Apple’s feature is iPhone-only and shows a text warning a young child can’t read. Guby is for Android, and uses a friendly owl instead of words, so it works for children too young to read.

Yes. The distance check is fully on the device and needs no connection at all. Internet is only used to send your weekly email recap.

When the phone comes too close, a friendly owl appears and gently covers the screen. The moment your child eases the phone back to a comfortable distance, the owl steps aside and whatever they were doing carries on.

During setup you can pick the handful of apps your child actually uses. Guby is on duty only while one of those is open, and rests the rest of the time, which also keeps it light on the battery.

Yes. Add YouTube Kids, or any app your child uses, to your chosen list during setup, and Guby will be on duty while it is open.

It depends which way up it is. Face down on a table, Guby turns the camera off by itself, since nobody is looking at the screen. Face up, it stays on but checks the distance less often, because a child isn’t usually right up close to a phone lying flat, and constant checking would only drain the battery for no reason. The moment the phone is picked up, Guby is back to normal.

Glasses are fine. The one thing worth knowing is that they make Guby’s distance reading come out about a centimetre shorter than the real distance. That small margin doesn’t change much in practice; if anything, your child is nudged from a touch further back.

If the front camera is covered, Guby simply can’t measure the distance, so for that moment it can’t nudge. The same goes for very low light, when it can’t make out a face. For now, Guby stays quiet in those cases rather than guessing. If parents tell us this is a problem in real life, we’ll add a setting to show the owl whenever the camera can’t see, so nothing slips through.

Guby goes by whoever is closest to the screen, since that’s the child most likely to be too near. So if two little ones are huddled over the same phone, the one leaning in closest is the one it looks after.

The settings that matter sit behind a lock, either your phone’s own lock or a separate Guby PIN, so a child can’t quietly change them. A child could still uninstall the app, which we have chosen not to block for this age group; there is more on that on the how-it-works page.

Any feature that uses the camera uses some battery, and we won’t pretend otherwise. The app list keeps it small, Guby only runs while one of your chosen apps is open. Most parents in early access haven’t noticed a significant difference.

A single calm note: your child’s healthy-distance rate, how many gentle nudges there were, and the rough patterns across the days. No images, no identity, no minute-by-minute log.

It is the share of your child’s screen time spent at a comfortable distance rather than too close. A higher number means the phone stayed an arm’s length away more of the time.

Screen distance is a slow, gentle habit, not an emergency. A daily alert would turn it into a source of stress; a quiet weekly summary is enough to see the trend without anyone feeling kept under a microscope.

You can, as long as you don’t mind sharing your screen with an owl. Guby is tuned for two-to-eight-year-olds out of the box, but there is a setting to adjust the distance at which the nudge appears. That matters because grown-ups have bigger faces, so a distance that is just right for a small child can read as too close for an adult. Tune it to suit, and Guby works happily for older children and grown-ups too.