For parents and guardians

Your teenager has Bamba!, or is thinking about it. Here is what it is, in two minutes, so you can decide how you feel about it.

Who can have an account

Nobody under 13. We ask for a date of birth when an account is created, and that date stays on the phone - it is never sent to us or stored anywhere.

There is no messaging. At all.

This is the thing most worth knowing. Bamba! has no direct messages, no private chat, no anonymous chat and no stranger matching. There is no mechanism by which an adult can start a private conversation with your child in this app. That was a deliberate decision at the very start and it is not going to change.

What can be seen by others

Only what your teenager chooses to share, one item at a time. Their catch log, their saved fishing spots and their notes are private by default. A shared photo appears in the feed with their display name. Faces in a photo shared from an under-18 account are blurred automatically - found on the phone, never uploaded anywhere to be checked - and your teenager has to tap a face to reveal it. The original photo in their own logbook is never altered.

Locations

A saved fishing spot is private. Sharing one is a separate, deliberate choice, and even then a place only appears on the public map once three different anglers have independently tagged it - so a shared spot never reveals that one particular person fishes alone somewhere. Photos have their location data stripped before upload.

What we do about bad content

Every post is checked automatically before it appears - words, images, and an AI safety model. Any user can report anything, and reporting hides it immediately. Any user can also block another, which is private and tells the blocked person nothing. Our child safety standards are published here.

Money

Some features need a paid subscription. That purchase goes through Google Play or the App Store, so if your teenager's device is managed through Family Link or Family Sharing, it will ask you first - as it does for anything else.

If you want the account gone

It can be deleted from inside the app in Settings, with no questions asked and no retention offer. Or write to us and we will do it. See deleting an account.