How Guby works

Guby has one job: to notice when your child's phone or tablet drifts too close to their face, and to nudge it back, gently, without you having to say a word. Everything below is how that actually happens on the device in your child's hands.

What happens when your child holds the phone too close?

Your child is absorbed in something, and the screen creeps in towards their nose. When it crosses a healthy screen distance, a friendly owl appears and softly covers what's on screen. Not a buzzer, not a warning in words a young child can't read. Just an owl, asking for a little room.

The moment your child eases the phone back to a comfortable distance, the owl steps aside and the video carries on. Come in close, the owl returns. Ease back, it's gone. Children work the rhythm out fast, usually without anyone explaining it, because the response is the same every time and it never scolds.

How does Guby know how far away the phone is?

Guby uses the front camera to estimate the distance between the screen and your child's face, and it does this entirely on the device. Nothing is recorded. No frame is saved, and nothing from the camera is sent anywhere. The estimate happens in the moment and is gone the next.

Because it all runs on the phone, the distance check needs no internet at all. Guby keeps working on a flight, in the car, or anywhere the signal drops. There is no face recognition and no profile of your child; Guby reads distance, not identity. You can see exactly what stays on the device, and the little we ever send, in our privacy policy.

Which apps is Guby on duty for?

You choose. During setup you pick the handful of apps your child actually uses, the video app, a favourite reader, a game or two. Guby is on duty only while one of those is open, and rests the rest of the time.

This does two useful things. It keeps Guby out of the way when your child isn't on one of those apps, and it means the camera isn't working any harder than it needs to, which is kinder to the battery. Even when Guby is on duty, it never sees what is on the screen or which app is open beyond the list you set. It minds the distance, nothing else.

What lands in your weekly email?

Once a week, a single calm note arrives in your inbox. It shows how the week went in plain numbers: 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.

Weekly, on purpose. A daily alert turns a good habit into a source of stress, and screen distance isn't an emergency, it's a slow, gentle shift. A quiet weekly summary is enough to see the trend without anyone feeling kept under a microscope.

Can a determined five-year-old just switch it off?

The settings that matter, turning Guby off or changing which apps it covers, sit behind a lock. You can use your phone's own lock, the passcode or fingerprint you already have, or set a separate Guby PIN, whichever suits you. Either way, a child can't quietly change Guby and carry on.

The one thing a child could still do, in theory, is uninstall the app outright. Blocking that would mean asking for device-admin permissions, the powerful kind that stop an app being removed, and for the two-to-eight age group we think that's more intrusion than the situation calls for. In practice, children this young rarely know how to uninstall an app. If we start hearing otherwise, we'll happily add the right safeguard then; we'd rather not ask for heavy permissions before there's a real reason to.

What about the battery?

Here's the honest version: any feature that uses the camera uses some battery, and Guby is no exception. We won't pretend otherwise. What we've done is keep that cost as small as we can.

The app list is the biggest reason it stays light, Guby only runs while one of your chosen apps is open, rather than all day long. Most parents in our early access don't notice a meaningful difference in their battery. If you ever do, shortening the list of apps Guby looks after is the quickest fix.

Who is it for?

Guby is tuned for children roughly two to eight years old, on Android phones and tablets running Android 8.0 or newer. Younger faces are too small for the distance estimate to be reliable. The two-to-eight years are its sweet spot, where a small, wordless reminder lands best and a gentle habit has the room to take root.

That said, Guby isn't off-limits to anyone older. There's a setting to adjust the distance at which the nudge appears, so an older child, or a grown-up who doesn't mind an owl, can tune it to suit a bigger face and use it too.