Lingokids

Is Lingokids safe for kids?

Yes. For a child between about two and eight, Lingokids is close to the safest kind of app there is: no ads, no chat, no videos from strangers and no way to reach other users. We score it 69/100, ahead of Duolingo (61) and well ahead of open platforms such as YouTube (54).

It is not a perfect score because Lingokids is a subscription business that markets hard to parents. The privacy questions sit on the grown-up side of the app: how parents are tracked as customers, and how hard the paywall pushes.

What Lingokids collects from children

The privacy policy, updated in September 2026, describes a deliberately thin profile. A child gets a profile ID linked to an age range, language and learning progress. The app does not ask for a child's location, and the policy says it collects no biometric data such as face geometry or voice prints.

Three details are worth knowing:

• Speech games. Some activities need a spoken answer. If you allow the microphone, speech recognition runs and the recording stays on the device, according to the policy. You can say no and the rest of the app still works.
• AI progress reports. Lingokids uses AI to turn a child's activity into reports for parents. The policy says you can object to this processing.
• Analytics. Child activity goes into analytics with a COPPA setting switched on, held separately from adult data, and with Google's App Instance ID set to limited-ad-data mode.

The app is also listed by kidSAFE, an FTC-approved safe-harbour programme, as a member since 2017.

Where the tracking comes in

Apple's privacy label for Lingokids says identifiers are used to track you across other companies' apps and websites. That is unusual for an app in the App Store's Kids category, and it refers to parents, not children. The policy explains: when an adult installs the app or starts a free trial after seeing an ad, Lingokids records the IP address and device identifiers to measure the campaign. It also shares parents' IP address, identifiers and email with advertising partners to decide who should see its ads. Under California law that counts as "sharing", and you can opt out with Global Privacy Control or by emailing the company.

Google Play's data safety form says Lingokids shares no data with third parties. The privacy policy describes more than that, so we scored privacy on the policy and the Apple label.

The subscription

Most of Lingokids sits behind a paid plan. On the US App Store, monthly plans cost $14.99 to $15.99 and yearly plans $71.99 to $89.99, with several overlapping tiers. Subscriptions bought through Apple or Google renew automatically until you cancel them in the store; deleting the app changes nothing.

Apple lists parental controls among the app's in-app controls, and purchases go through the store's own payment confirmation. That keeps a four-year-old from buying a plan alone. It does not change the basic deal: a child who has played the free activities will soon meet locked ones, and the request to unlock them lands with the parent.

How to set up Lingokids safely

1. Start the free trial with a reminder in your calendar a few days before it ends, and cancel in your Apple or Google account if you do not want to pay.
2. Turn on Global Privacy Control in your browser, or email [email protected], to opt out of Lingokids sharing your data with ad partners.
3. Leave the microphone and camera off unless your child wants the speaking games. The rest of the app works without them.
4. Use a unique password for the parent account, since no two-step login option is published.
5. When your child outgrows the app, cancel the plan and ask [email protected] to delete the data, rather than just deleting the app.

How we scored it

Scams and harmful content (88) and the regulatory record (87) are Lingokids' strongest factors: no chat, no ads and no regulator action found, though no regulator has examined the app either. Privacy (56) is the weakest, because parents' identifiers feed ad tracking and the Play Store form understates the sharing in the policy. Security (66) reflects a clean record with little public evidence about how the company protects accounts.