Brickify Guide
Set up your 10-year-old's phone for school
One-time setup: apps get blocked automatically during school hours, and the phone is normal the rest of the day. No daily faffing.
One-time setup: apps get blocked automatically during school hours, and the phone is normal the rest of the day. No daily faffing.
The goal here isn't "the phone is locked all the time" — it's "the phone behaves itself during school hours, on its own, without you having to remember to do anything." Brickify does this with two profiles: one for normal life, one for school hours, switching between them automatically.
Choose a PIN, add a second factor (an authenticator app or email code — this is what stops a determined 10-year-old undoing everything alone), and save your recovery codes somewhere safe.
Your first profile is automatically the default — it's what's active whenever nothing else is scheduled, so it's what the phone looks like evenings, weekends, and holidays. For a 10-year-old's first phone, we'd suggest this one isn't wide open either: block the Play Store/App Store (blocked by default when you create a profile), block the high-risk categories below, and only leave in apps you've actually vetted yourself — a few examples: Pokémon GO, ScratchJr, Times Tables Rock Stars. What counts as fine is your call, not a fixed list.
Apps worth blocking on a 10-year-old's default profile: Discord, WhatsApp (unless it's family-monitored), Snapchat, other social media (TikTok, Instagram, Twitter/X), OnlyFans, Roblox, secure/disappearing picture-sharing apps, encrypted messaging (Telegram, Signal, and similar), web browsers, random/anonymous chat apps (Kik and similar), VPN apps (these can bypass blocking entirely), and any "vault" or app-locker apps (used to hide content from parents). Not an exhaustive list — use your own judgement for your own child.
Name it something like School Day.
Pick the games, social apps, and anything else you don't want open during lessons. On Android, tap the "Play Store" chip too, so nothing new can be installed during the school window either — it's blocked by default when you create a profile. On iPhone, include the App Store in the picker for the same reason.
Leave "Set profile to default" off. Toggle on the school weekdays (Mon–Fri), turn off "All day," and set a start and end time — e.g. 08:30 to 15:30. Save.
Go to Home and tap BRICK once. This is the only manual step — it arms the schedule. From here on, "School Day" switches in automatically at 08:30 and switches back to normal at 15:30, every weekday, without you touching the phone.
How this actually works: Brickify doesn't need a schedule on your "normal" profile — it's just defined as "whatever's active when nothing else is scheduled." Only the School Day profile needs a time window. Outside school hours, Brickify automatically falls back to normal.
If you ever unbrick manually — say, an early pickup — that's treated as temporary. Brickify picks the schedule back up on its own at the next real boundary (the next 08:30 or 15:30), not the next time you remember to press the button.
| Profile | Default? | Blocks | Schedule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safe Apps (your first profile) | Yes | Play Store/App Store, plus the high-risk categories above — only vetted apps left in | Always active — no schedule needed |
| School Day | No | Everything the default profile blocks, plus games and any other apps not needed for school | Weekdays, e.g. 08:30–15:30 |