Patrickmathews
Lurker
I recently bought a blu studio energy phone running 4.4 for my son. He has autism and is completely non verbal. He uses this phone with a text to speech app to communicate with people around him. I like the phone and especially the battery which was a problem with his last device (it would die in the afternoon). I also have a gps tracking app on the phone which allows me to see where he (or at least his phone) is at all times and currently have funamo parental control app.
The problem is that he loves to press buttons and screws with settings to the point where the phone does not work properly. I have installed a few parental control apps including applock and funamo. Applock does not survive a reboot - it must be started each time the phone is booted. I tried several auto start apps and they worked intermittently at best. My theory is that he reboots the phone, then as soon as the login screen is displayed he logs in and starts messing around before any of the auto start or parental control apps are loaded. When I test it, if I reboot the phone, then slide the lock to open as soon as the screen shows up, I cannot get past the parental control app.
I don't know how my 8 year old kid is doing this and it is driving me insane.
Before writing this question, I just had to do a factor reset on the phone as I spent about 20 minutes trying to get it to act normally.
My son very quickly figured out that he can hold the power button down and get a cool looking menu that allows him to press buttons - like power off, reboot, airplane mode, silence or meeting. This is the menu that comes up when you press the power button on this phone for about 4 seconds.
Is there any way of changing this so the power button will only power off or on the phone and not show a menu? I have a feeling it is baked into this particular build of android as I know it varies from phone to phone.
I would also like to disable the volume buttons on the side of the phone and only use the soft button from inside the app. I presses these sometimes without realizing it and it renders his text to speech app useless. Unfortunately, many of his teachers and other caregivers are a bit less than adept at figuring out the volume is turned down and he is then unable to communicate until I or someone else gets to him.
The problem is that he loves to press buttons and screws with settings to the point where the phone does not work properly. I have installed a few parental control apps including applock and funamo. Applock does not survive a reboot - it must be started each time the phone is booted. I tried several auto start apps and they worked intermittently at best. My theory is that he reboots the phone, then as soon as the login screen is displayed he logs in and starts messing around before any of the auto start or parental control apps are loaded. When I test it, if I reboot the phone, then slide the lock to open as soon as the screen shows up, I cannot get past the parental control app.
I don't know how my 8 year old kid is doing this and it is driving me insane.
Before writing this question, I just had to do a factor reset on the phone as I spent about 20 minutes trying to get it to act normally.
My son very quickly figured out that he can hold the power button down and get a cool looking menu that allows him to press buttons - like power off, reboot, airplane mode, silence or meeting. This is the menu that comes up when you press the power button on this phone for about 4 seconds.
Is there any way of changing this so the power button will only power off or on the phone and not show a menu? I have a feeling it is baked into this particular build of android as I know it varies from phone to phone.
I would also like to disable the volume buttons on the side of the phone and only use the soft button from inside the app. I presses these sometimes without realizing it and it renders his text to speech app useless. Unfortunately, many of his teachers and other caregivers are a bit less than adept at figuring out the volume is turned down and he is then unable to communicate until I or someone else gets to him.
