When it comes to mobile phone monitoring, there seem to
be a whole lot of apps in the market right now. All have different things to
offer—trouble is finding out which of those actually work and which of those
are there to scam the money out of your credit cards. Lucky for you, we have
delightfully agreed to be your guinea pigs and go through each of those
ourselves and review them so you don’t have to.
The app in focus today is xnspy, a mobile spy app meant for parents and employers
around the world. Let’s see how this one fares.
The Installation Process
I’m not going to lie—the
installation part of the app is a little tricky. But then again, that much we
expected from an app of this nature. First of all, you’ve got to have the
target device in hand at the time of installation. Second of all, you have to
purchase the app of the website, after which you receive a download URL. You
have to physically type in the URL on your target phone. Given the fact that I
have no hand-eye coordination, it took me a good three tries before I got in
the URL typed exactly right. But as they say, third time’s the charm and after
that all I had to do was following the installation manual they gave me. A lot
of tapping “Next” in System Task Permissions was involved. After that, you’ve
got to have login credentials. Then you’re in.
Logging On
So, in order to log in, you’ve
got to have your username and password. These should be emailed to you as soon
as you make the purchase. Our email got held up for a few minutes (8 to be
exact) and we started panicking in this time. We asked their Customer Support
guy questions… a lot of questions during those 8 minutes. But they were all too
keen to assure us that we’re sure to get that email within a 24 hour time
period (aren’t nobody got time for that). Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait
that long. Once we got our emails, we logged in and finally got to the good
stuff—the meat of the app, the Control Panel.
The Sidebar
So, on the Control Panel, there
is a sidebar, which basically contains everything and
anything XNSPY mobile spy claims to monitor and record. It’s basically like a
neat little shelf that holds all your data in little folders. Click on each one
and it takes you to the individual dock where you can look at the stuff more
closely. Here are some of
the features it offers:
- IM message monitoring
- Call recording
- Surroundings recording
- Internet monitoring
- Kik spying
- Facebook Messenger
- Email reading
The Holdbacks
Of course, like any other app in
the world, this too comes with its holdbacks. First of all, there is no way I
can spy on the target phone’s Snapchat. Second of all, if your employee is
still rocking a vintage Blackberry, you won’t be able to keep an eye on them
because XNSPY is only where the cool kids are—Apple and Android.
Moving Forwards
In the future, we suppose XNSPY
could benefit greatly by keeping up with monitoring newer apps like Vine or
Snapchat so that parents are able to fully monitor all the social media apps
kids are so enthusiastically using these days. Other than that, a solid effort
in mobile phone monitoring.
