Summary: Google is reportedly planning to offer an easier way to access parental control settings in Android 16. According to a report, Android 16 Beta 4 has a hidden “Supervision” page within the Settings app that allows users to easily filter explicit web content for a supervised account.
If you are a parent concerned about your kids being exposed to harmful content online, there is some good news for you. As you may know, there are tons of parental control tools available for Android. However, most of them seek all sorts of permissions that you may not be willing to give.
That’s where Google’s parental control app, Family Link, comes in. You can find different settings to prevent your children from accessing specific content on the web. While it’s already useful, Google reportedly plans to tightly integrate Family Link and make parental control settings easier to access with Android 16.
Android 16 could offer a “Supervision” page to easily access parental control settings
According to Android Authority, Google plans to add a new “Supervision” page within the Android Settings app. Per the report, the new page will appear on the main Settings screen, below the existing “Digital Wellbeing & parental controls” section. If you have a device running Android 16 Beta 4, you won’t see that page right away.
However, the outlet managed to activate the page manually. As seen in the screenshot below, the “Supervision” page includes two different items. The first one is “use device supervision.” It has a toggle right beside it, which is disabled by default. This indicates that the feature is optional. The next parental control feature listed on the page is “web content filters.” It remains grayed out until you toggle on the above option.
As explained by the outlet, enabling device supervision requires you to enter a new PIN for the supervised account. Once you enable supervision, you’ll be able to turn on web content filters for the supervised account.
You will be able to change default parental control settings to block explicit websites in Chrome and explicit images, text, and links from appearing in the Search results in Android version 16. Although this content filter wouldn’t block all the explicit material from the web, it should be able to hide the most inappropriate ones.
Google might add other features to the page down the line
Let’s not forget that the new page’s description mentions “content restrictions & other limits.” So, it’s safe to assume that Google wants to add many other features down the line. Although there are no indications of when this page would go live, there’s some possibility of it being available in one of the quarterly releases of Android 16. If it doesn’t, the “Supervision” page for accessing parental controls settings might debut with the stable Android 16 release.
