How to set up Parental Controls and Block Porn on Your Phone

Last edited: 2025-05-18 06:09:07

Living in an age where porn is just one click away on a device you carry everywhere it has never been harder to stop watching porn. This guide will show you how to block adult content and set parental controls on your phone.

Good Apps for Blocking Porn

The two main apps we will be using for blocking porn are “Bulldog Blocker” and “Lock Me Out”. These two apps will give you a big toolset in blocking porn in many ways.

Bulldog Blocker - AI Porn Blocker

Bulldog Blocker allows you to block apps which is nice but the sole reason we will be using it is because of its AI detection of porn or immodest clothing. The AI detection costs around $40 per year, but it is well worth it as it works well, although be ready for some false detections from time to time. You can read my review of the app here

Lock Me Out - App and Website Blocker

The second app you should be using is Lock Me Out. Lock Me Out gives you a vast number of options for blocking both apps and websites. I mainly use it for blocking apps. Examples of options for blocking are:

• Time-specific blocks – allows you to create block lists that are enabled on chosen days and times
• Location-based blocks – allow you to create blocks that are only enabled in certain areas. Great, for example, to block your web browser when you are at home, but when you are on the move, it is unblocked for you to look up important things.
• Hiding notifications from blocked apps

Lock Me Out is a great supplement to Bulldog Blocker, and the two make a great combo. It has a one-time fee of around $45 for unlimited-size block lists, but you can try the free version first. What makes it extra powerful is that you can also block system apps, which is useful since you can use this to mitigate loopholes and workarounds that disable your blocking apps. You can read my review of Lock Me Out here

One great way to use Lock Me Out is to store passwords to other block setups. For instance, if you have AdGuard Home set up on your network (guide here), you might not want the password easily accessible. What you can do is use an app like Safe Notes, store your long password there, and then you block Safe Notes using Lock Me Out so that you cannot access the password.

Blocking Porn Websites on Your Phone

As already mentioned, Lock Me Out has the capability of blocking websites, and that might be enough for you, but I will also give you three other options.

Using Public Free Parental Control DNS Servers

A DNS server is like a phone book for the internet, translating human-readable website names (like google.com) into numeric IP addresses that computers use to locate and connect to websites. Some people have created DNS servers where you could say that porn sites in the phone book does not have a number meaning that you won’t connect to the porn site. You can set what DNS server your phone should be using in your settings. Every phone is different, but if you search “DNS” in your settings, you should find some kind of setting where you can set a specific DNS. AdGuard provides some different DNS servers, one of which is a “Family protection server” that blocks porn. The hostname for this DNS server is “family.adguard-dns.com” which you set as your private DNS in your settings.

Blocking Specific Websites Using AdGuard DNS

AdGuard also allows you to make your own DNS server for a small fee, where you can set your own rules on which websites are blocked. This is great if the public DNS server does not block some websites you want blocked, for example, x.com. I have made a guide on AdGuard DNS, so check that guide out if you want to know more. What is great with AdGuard DNS is that you can use it for multiple devices, so you can also use the same custom block list for your computer. Just change the DNS on your computer to your custom DNS server. It also allows you the see all the Internet traffic, so it is great for parental control and checking what your kids are browsing.

Blocking Specific Websites Using personalDNSfilter

A free option to block websites and do custom DNS filtering on your phone is using the app personalDNSfilter. This works like AdGuard DNS, although you get fewer ways to do matching to domains, and you cannot reuse the block list for your computer. It is still a great free choice that is worth checking out.

Turning off Parental Controls and Bypassing Phone Porn Blockers

As you might expect there are several ways to get around porn blockers on your phone so I have made a guide for blocking loopholes and bypasses around porn blockers on your smartphone, which you buy here here. I have it paywalled to cover the cost of this website and so people searching for workarounds cannot access them easily. Hope it helps!