Difficult to use

Still figuring out

Bark does not work with Starlink. I asked their support team before I purchased bark with premium service and they said that it will work. After a week of back and forth email with their support team it does not work. It is impossible to talk to a real person. All their support is offshore via email or chat. Terrible service, terrible support. I’m very disappointed.

Installation instructions don’t match what customer support suggests. App does not connect to apps when you have access to the device

It’s been a little over a week since I got my son a bark phone and I still haven’t figured out how to do anything at all. I’ve logged into every app, but they don’t exist anywhere. I can’t figure out how to access anything that I’ve signed him into. I don’t know how there isn’t an easier process for this phone to work. Congrats on all of you who figure this out. So far it’s been a waste of money just a lot of frustration for myself.

This app is so restrictive that it prevents you from being able to do simple things that have nothing to do with safety. It’s a pain to set up. It slows down the phones that it’s monitoring and makes them nearly impractical to use. You’re better off just getting your kid an old dumb phone that can’t do anything.

Difficult and unclear set up process

Takes 2-3 HOURS to analyse phone. How in the world are you supposed to do anything. And I let it go for 30-40 mins and it starts over. So ridiculous

The parental app sometimes can be confusing. Even with guides ect. Also I have home and school zones marked. Shows he left school when he’s still on campus. Or he left home when he is still home. Then when he leaves either of them for real takes about 15 mins before it sends me a alert.

In theory this is an incredible service but the result isn’t what we signed up for. The alerts for specifically messenger kids and WhatsApp are so messy and chaotic and not accurate at all. They’ll show incorrect chat, show that my daughter said something that someone else did in a totally separate chat, and I’ll get 20+ notifications for the same message but showing from various chats and senders but it’ll keep popping up as it Bark does a crawl through messages and alerts me every time it crawls, but it doesn’t ever pull accurately or even consistently. There have been several times where something was not working correctly (an app not working even though settings allowed it, or, no phone calls/messaging working) but since there’s no phone or chat support I had to wait for email help and go back and forth through email to troubleshoot, which is insane to me as her phone bill costs more than mine. Also not specific to the app but within 3 months of having the Bark phone the speaker stopped working - no water damage or dropping the phone, just quit working, so headphones have to be used now for any audio. Overall very frustrated, it’s great in theory like I said and it’s a really important service, I just wish it worked. Side note- It would be great for things like spring break/ holidays/ early-releases etc, to schedule in advance temporary pauses from school rules instead of manually updating each set.