Frequently asked questions.

On August 26, 2026, Meta settled with the attorneys general of nearly every U.S. state and territory. The headline number, at least $12.1 billion and rising to as much as $17.1 billion if the other major platforms settle on similar terms, is paid to states over roughly ten years. Three things about it are widely misread.

The money does not go to districts. States receive it and decide where it goes. Many are required to spend at least half on youth social-media harms, a category that explicitly names phone-free school grants alongside mental-health and crisis support, staff training, and after-school programming. Your district may see some of it, but only if your state stands up a program and you apply.

The product changes are not a device policy. Meta agreed to mute non-message push notifications on school-year weekdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., default teen accounts to a two-hour daily limit, block access from midnight to 6 a.m., verify age, drop cosmetic filters for minors, and offer non-algorithmic feeds. All of that applies to Facebook and Instagram, on accounts Meta believes belong to a minor. It does not touch TikTok, Snapchat, YouTube, games, messaging, or the browser, and it silences notifications rather than restricting use.

The district lawsuits are still live. Roughly 1,400 school districts have separate claims pending against Meta, Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, with the first trials set for February 8, 2027. The attorneys-general settlement did not resolve them.

Where Focus fits. The settlement quiets one company's notifications during a window that company estimates. It does not enforce your bell schedule, cover the rest of the apps on the device, honor your IEP/504 exceptions, or produce anything you can hand to a state reporting office. Focus does: it applies your policy to the whole device, on campus, during instructional time, hands control back after the bell, and logs every decision as exportable compliance evidence. And if your state opens phone-free-school grants out of settlement funds, an enforcement platform is precisely the kind of expenditure they are meant to cover, with the record a grant report will ask for.

It can, and your school decides how much. Focus always keeps a device's current last-known location available to administrators. The Live Map and device page answer where a device is right now. Whether a historical location trail is stored is set by an org-wide Monitoring policy with three modes: Lockdown only (the default) records location only while an emergency lockdown is active; Inside geofence only records location only while a device is on campus inside a managed geofence, with no off-campus trail; Always records every location heartbeat, including off campus, for schools with a documented operational need. In every mode Focus does not collect browsing history, messages, or app content, and policy enforcement itself stays bound to the campus geofence and school hours. Because the school administers this setting, families should ask their district which mode it uses.

An MDM manages devices as assets: inventory, OS updates, app installs. It is not geofenced or schedule-aware, and pushing a policy change to a whole fleet can take many minutes. Focus adds a real-time control plane on top of your MDM: it enforces the school day automatically and locks the entire fleet in 2–3 seconds. It runs alongside your MDM, with no rip-and-replace.

Under 3% of daily battery. Focus uses efficient silent push rather than constant polling, so devices stay responsive without the drain that always-on monitoring tools cause.

A single click locks every enrolled device in 2–3 seconds, fast enough to matter during a drill or real emergency, rather than waiting on a polling cycle.

Devices enroll in under a minute by scanning a QR code. The policy is baked in at enrollment, so there is no per-device configuration and no help-desk pileup on rollout day.

Yes. Focus supports per-student and per-class carve-outs so you can honor educational, medical, and IEP/504 exceptions without disabling the program for everyone else. Teachers can also grant authorized in-class exceptions.

Focus is designed for the managed devices schools actually run: iOS/iPadOS and ChromeOS 1:1 fleets, with Android support on the roadmap. Tell us your fleet mix during the pilot and we'll confirm coverage.

Focus collects the minimum needed to enforce policy and produce compliance reports: device enrollment identifiers, campus/schedule state, and policy events. It does not collect browsing history, message content, keystrokes, or app content. Device location is captured only according to the Monitoring policy setting, which defaults to lockdown-only, meaning it is recorded only while an emergency lockdown is active. See our privacy policy and security overview for detail on storage and retention.

Focus is built to enforce the outcomes state laws require: restricting devices during instructional time, applying policy on campus, honoring exceptions, and producing an exportable compliance report. Use the state-law lookup to see how Focus maps to your specific statute.

We configure your geofence, bell schedule, and policy together, usually in an afternoon, then you run Focus free at one or two schools for 60–90 days. At the end you decide with real compliance data in hand. No commitment and no hardware to buy.

Yes. Focus is patent pending: a U.S. provisional patent application covering its geofenced, schedule-aware enforcement method is on file with the USPTO. What that protects is the part that is hard to copy: a single enforcement contract shared by the iOS, Android, and ChromeOS clients, so a policy decision made on campus at 10:14 a.m. resolves identically on every platform in your fleet rather than drifting between them.