Gryphon HomeBound

Do you even care about the ones it affects?

I’ll answer my own question. No. You don’t. This app nearly killed me(I’m not joking. Research the thing you might have heard of called mental health). It sure gave me a load of mental health issues. Look, you probably don’t care what a 14 year old thinks about your stupid app but maybe someone will read this and actually care. You don’t deserve to know my situation but I’ll tell you this darn app thing did not help it whatsoever. I was doing just fine until this came around. Congrats on ruining a good life. And look, I understand why this app exists but don’t just think about the lives you could be affecting next time. Maybe you have but obviously it didn’t show in the app.

Premise is great, execution not so much

The idea of being able filter content to protect my children while they are away from home is great and was one of the main selling points for our family purchasing a Gryphon router and paying for the premium services. But as I’ve come to realize the HomeBound application is not usable for our family at this time. It does too good of a job filtering content as we cannot stream music reliably while connected to the VPN. It makes normal use of our phones a nightmare. I have not found any easy reliable way to turn off the VPN when it wants to prevent any sort of internet activity on our devices. The dealbreaker for me and why I will not use the app anymore for my kids is it prevents us from seeing our child’s location via “Find My Phone”. Although we can prevent certain traffic from being blocked through the Gryphon app it would be greatly received if there was some machine learning that would take the communities white list entries and compile them to a known database that would assist future users from going through the same headache of researching all the blocked sites and whitelisting them. There is much to be improved upon but I hope this app gets there someday as the idea is great.