Life360 Has Acquired Screen Time App ZenScreen

By Annie Baker • Nov 12, 2019
  • ZenScreen, an AI-powered solution that guides families to better screen time habits, announced it expanded its free offerings and revealed it is owned by Life360 now

ZenScreen — an AI-powered solution that guides families to better screen time habits for a more balanced digital diet — announced an expanded free offering and revealed that it is now part of Life360.

“We know that parenting is complicated enough without having to constantly worry about screen time and device use,” said Nitin Bhandari, founder and CEO of ZenScreen creator Zenlabs. “Unplugging is an important part of family life, whether setting up places like home and school where screen time is restricted or making sure that phone use doesn’t happen while driving. We couldn’t be prouder to be part of Life360’s family of services tailored to the unique demands of families everywhere.”

Screen time is considered a major concern for families, according to several national surveys. And research by Life360 found that nearly half (47%) of parents of elementary-aged children worry that their kids are spending too much time in front of screens. And more than 67% of parents surveyed believe that the digital age has made parenting more difficult.

“Family life can be stressful and chaotic, and Life360 is the leading platform for today’s busy families navigating a digital world,” added Chris Hulls, CEO and Co-Founder, Life360. “When we met Nitin and the Zenlabs team it was clear that we share the same vision for helping parents and kids manage their screen time in a productive and healthy fashion.”

ZenScreen has rolled out a new update that provides full functionality for up to five devices for free and increasing customization options to better help manage screen time like a balanced diet. Unlike other screen time apps, ZenScreen users are now able to change up the category of any app to best suit their personal style.

And ZenScreen automatically categorizes every app into three categories. Some apps users want to limit as they do carbs and sugar. And other apps don’t need to be limited, like vegetables: entertainment apps (use within a set daily limit) productive apps (use as much as you want until time to wind down at night), and ignore (apps that don’t need to be monitored at all like clock and calendar).

Plus the update also brings new and improved onboarding for users with iOS devices. And users with an existing MDM — the technology that can remotely manage apps — can now use ZenScreen’s Standard Mode that only takes one step to install and co-exists with other MDM solutions.

The Standard Mode offers high-level screen time usage as a daily graph. And ZenScreen’s screen time controls include Smart Mornings that limit distractions at the start of the day, Zen Breaks from social media, Daily Time Limit, and Calm Nights.

“We are excited to take the patent-pending AI-powered features like Zen Breaks and Smart Mornings to a much larger user base, and positively impact the digital wellbeing of users,” explained Naveen Puvvula, CTO and Co-Founder of Zenlabs.

Life360 is a platform for today’s busy families that brings them closer together by helping them better know, communicate with, and protect each other. Life360’s core offering is the Life360 mobile app — which is an app for families with features that range from communications to driving safety and location sharing. And in collaboration with the PTA, Life360 has a downloadable guide called the ‘Modern Parenting Insights’ Go Guide. And Life360 is now seeing 20 million monthly active users located in over 160 countries.