WhatsApp sign-in, anywhere · Android
Tuck Me In gently locks the phone at bedtime, gives each app a daily minute budget, and lets you grant five more minutes with a tap. No spying. No nagging. A phone that knows when it's time to sleep.
Fig. 01 - Bedtime kicks in.
Same phone, two states.
01The Features
We started with the five behaviours we needed at home, then added the five our friends kept asking for, and one for the families that want it. No microphone, no screen recording, no message reading — that line still doesn't move. Location is opt-in, and the rest of the app works fine without it.
F·01
Set a weekday window. Set a different weekend window. The phone locks itself at 21:00 and unlocks itself at 06:30 - and you don't have to be in the room when it happens.
F·02
TikTok 45 minutes. Reading apps unlimited. WhatsApp paused after dinner. When the daily minutes are spent, the app is locked until tomorrow.
F·03
One tap from the parent app. The child's phone locks instantly with a message of your choice - even mid-video.
F·04
The agent registers as a device admin. It can't be uninstalled, force-stopped, or disabled without the parent's approval. Set a four-to-six digit tamper PIN and even reaching the Settings screen prompts for it. Every attempt is logged and pings you the moment it happens.
F·05
When the lock screen appears, there's one button. One tap sends you the request. Approve with a duration, deny in a swipe, or ignore. The child sees the result the second you decide - no shouting through the door.
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Pick the apps that count as homework. Tap once, or schedule a recurring window for after-school. The phone only opens those apps until the timer ends — and a minimum-duration commitment stops the bargaining.
F·07
Web Safety routes the phone's DNS through a family-safe resolver. Adult sites stop resolving on every browser, every app - no allow-list to maintain, no profile to log in to. Toggle it on, it stays on.
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Turn on the gate and anything they install lands in a pending state. Opening the app shows a brief "waiting for approval" notice. You approve or block from the parent app — they don't get to negotiate with the Play Store.
F·09
Ring the phone at full volume when it's lost in the couch. Silence it when the lesson starts. Drop a note on the lock screen ("homework first"). Pause indefinitely. Resume in one tap. Start bedtime early on a school-night meltdown. Each one is a single chip in the parent app — no menu-diving.
F·10
When we ship a new build, the agent fetches it, verifies the signature against its own, and stages it. The child phone locks until the kid taps Install — so the version your child runs is always the version with this month's fixes. You can postpone a specific release from the parent app if you need to.
F·11
The only feature on this page that asks for a permission you can say no to. Turn it on and you can pin home, school, and grandma's, see the phone on a live map, and get a quiet ping when it arrives or leaves. Leave it off and Tuck Me In never asks the OS for a location — bedtime, budgets, and everything else keep working untouched.
02How it works
One APK, Android 10 or newer. The agent registers itself as a device admin during setup so it can't be uninstalled later.
tuckmein.apk
Open the agent. It shows a pairing code that's valid for 15 minutes. Read it out, or pass the phone over.
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Open the Tuck Me In parent app on your phone, sign in by WhatsApp, type the code. Set bedtime. You're done.
Bedtime 21:00 ↔ 06:30
03Things we won't ship
Most apps in this category are surveillance products wearing parental-control branding. Tuck Me In isn't. Here's the list of things we promise we will never ship - written down, so you can hold us to it.
What we do collect » App names installed, minutes spent in each app, lock and unlock events, and the schedule and budgets you set. That's the complete list - exactly enough for the budgets to work, and no more.
04Signing in
No password to remember. No security questions. You enter the WhatsApp number you already use - anywhere in the world - and we send you a six-digit code over WhatsApp. SMS works too as a fallback, for Zimbabwean (+263) numbers. That's the whole flow, for you and for any co-parent you share a device with.
04bThe child agent
The child agent is sideloaded - not in the Play Store - so we host the signed APK ourselves. Download it on the child's Android phone, install it, then enter the six-digit pairing code shown in your parent dashboard. Bedtime windows, app budgets, and "five more minutes?" go live immediately.
The agent runs as a foreground service on the child's phone. It works offline - network only used to sync schedule changes and accept "five more minutes" decisions.
05For Schools
Generate a batch of one-shot enrollment codes, hand them out with the APK. Each device joins a cohort, not a learner record. Reporting is aggregated and anonymous - usage patterns across Form 2B, not what individual learners are doing.
06FAQ
Not yet - v1 is Android-only because we can enforce a real device-admin lock there. Apple's Family Sharing covers some of the same ground on iOS, and we're watching that roadmap before deciding whether to build a sibling agent.
The list, complete: app names installed on the child's phone, minutes spent in each app, lock and unlock events, the schedule and budgets you set, and occasional tamper alerts. No content from any app. No messages, photos, mic, camera, screen, calls, or keystrokes.
Location is opt-in. Turn on Places & Geofencing for a device and the agent reports the phone's coordinates so you can pin home / school / grandma's, see the phone on a live map, and get an arrived-or-left ping. Leave it off and Tuck Me In never asks the OS for a location at all — every other feature works fine without it.
We collect the minimum needed for the features you've turned on. If a future feature would need more, we'll ask before we ship it.
Bedtime and app budgets still enforce - the agent keeps a local copy of the schedule and usage state in its own database. Flipping the phone to airplane mode at 20:59 doesn't get the child a free pass.
Any pending events (a tamper attempt, a "five more minutes?" request, usage stats) queue up locally and sync the next time the phone has data. Commands you send from the parent app go through Firebase push when reachable; the agent also polls on a quiet schedule as a fallback.
Not without the screen-unlock PIN you set during setup - Tuck Me In is registered as a device admin, which Android won't let an app remove without that PIN. Trying to disable the agent from the system settings logs a tamper event and pings you.
It's not bulletproof - a factory reset wipes everything, but that also wipes their data, contacts, photos, and game saves. In practice that's a high enough bar to make bedtime stick.
When the lock screen appears, there's one button: Five more minutes? One tap fires a request to the parent app. You see it instantly, tap a duration (5, 10, 30 mins), and approve or deny.
The child sees the result the moment you decide. You can also pre-write an answer like "ten more, but only on weekdays" - the agent applies it without you having to lift a finger next time.
Because Tuck Me In is sideloaded (not on the Play Store), Google Play Protect sometimes flags the APK during install — that's its default reaction to any app it hasn't catalogued, not a problem with our build. On the affected device you'll need to turn Play Protect off for the install, or tap Install anyway when it offers the option.
Don't worry about losing app-install oversight by doing this: Tuck Me In replaces it. Turn on the New apps wait for you gate from the parent app, and anything your child installs after that — Play Store or otherwise — lands in a pending state until you approve or block it. You're still in control of every new install, just from your phone instead of theirs.
Install on the child's phone. Sign in by WhatsApp on yours. Set bedtime. Sleep.