The Best Phone Monitoring App Reviews Series

A series of reports on mobile monitoring apps, based on real testing to let you decide which is the best spyphone app for your needs.

Mobile Spy Reviews | Cell Phone Spy Software & Phone Monitoring

Reviewed on December 21st, 2022

Pros, Cons and Bottom Line

    • Offers a good range of features for the price.
    • Subscriptions plans suit all budgets and the online dashboard is easy to use.

    • Immediately detected by antivirus.
    • No way to change how frequently data is uploaded.
Mobile Spy is not longer available.

Bottom Line

Mobile Spy is one of the oldest spyphone apps you can buy. Whilst offering a lot of features for the price it is starting to show its age with no modern features that other Android spyphone apps now provide.

Executive Summary

Mobile Spy is cell phone spy software that is designed and aimed at parents and employers.

Mobile Spy supplies mobile monitoring software for Android and iOS devices. They do not sell computer monitoring software.

The target market for those who want to spy on a cell phone with Mobile Spy are parents who want the best cell phone spyware to monitor their teen's internet usage as well as employers who want to monitor their employee's devices to make sure that they are really being used to do work.

The Mobile Spy cell phone spy software has a total of 23 features. This means that you are definitely getting value for money in terms of features at least. You can read further on in this article to see if the features actually worked as described or not but Mobile Spy cannot be used to monitor computers at this time, so, for that, you would need to look at a competitor.

Installation Summary

The Mobile Spy phone monitoring software is not as hidden as they want you to think.

This is the most important section for many people. Forget the features and the price, is the software really hidden after installation?  There are many different ways that an application can be uncovered.

mobile spy screenshot

These include being detected by antivirus software, notifications from SuperSu on a rooted device to being visible in the Android Manage Applications list.  Mobile Spy ticks all these boxes and can be found through all the methods just described.

On a rooted device, Mobile Spy’s stealth capabilities improve slightly with no application being visible on the application menu itself but it is still listed under the Manage Applications list.  That, along with frequent notices from SuperSU that a program has been granted root permissions all the time will immediately notify the device owner that something has been installed.


Mobile Spy tries to combat uninstallation by installing the program using a device administrator account that it adds during installation.  This is similar to Mspy which uses the same feature.  However, this can still be circumvented as you can simply go to the list of device administrators, remove the one Mobile Spy installs and then the software can be easily removed using the manage applications menu which is the same method as all other software we have already reviewed.

“Mobile Spy is easily detected by antivirus after you install it.”

It is known as ‘surveillanceware’ and you can simply close or uninstall it through Lookout making Mobile Spy unusable.  So far all of the products we have reviewed have been found and detected by Lookout Antivirus.

So far Mobile Spy is not really as hidden as the website says it is. In fact, most other Android spyphone apps we have reviewed are also not entirely undetectable, either on a rooted device or an unrooted device. Mobile Spy then should not be judged too harshly for this but is still needs to make sure it provides all the features that the website offers.


Features

Mobile Spy phone phone monitoring software has many features, but still isn't available as computer monitoring software.

Mobile Spy offers software in 3, 6 and 12 month subscription packages and supports all major smartphones and tablets.  They offer a total of  23 main features as well as an additional live-panel module which is a paid extra upon the price of the original subscription.


mobile spy screenshot

Out of the 23 main feature, we found that all worked as described with the exception of GPS tracking which worked but failed to display any kind of map inside the online account for you to visualise where the phone is.

“Most of Mobile Spy's features actually worked as they should.”

Instant Messaging programs such as Facebook and Whatsapp require the Target device to be rooted first.  In terms of how Mobile Spy rates on features it was a solid effort with all features that were tested working. 

However not all worked to a satisfactory enough level except for GPS tracking which failed to work and displayed no map on the online account either.

Either way, the main features require either root access first or the purchase of an additional live-panel add-on first.

Performance

We noticed increased data usage during all of our Mobile Spy review.


We first tested battery usage by installing Mobile Spy and having periods of low usage followed by periods of intense usage to see how well Mobile Spy captured data and how that affected battery life and data usage.

We performed the same set of tests individually for battery life and data usage and we found that with Mobile Spy installed our device lasted less than five hours after a full charge.  During this time nearly 400MB of data was generated by the software, especially during peak usage times and high activity such as taking picture and videos or viewing YouTube.

“Mobile Spy increases your data usage by 50%”

During our tests, we also monitored how long it took Mobile Spy to upload videos to our online account to see if this accounted for increased data usage and the results were surprising.  As we suspected the larger the video size to upload the longer it took and the more data was used. 

This is because Mobile Spy uploads all videos created in HD format as standard and whilst this means you get the best viewing quality possible inside your online account this choice in quality can affect both upload time and data usage.

This means that there is roughly a 50% increase in overall data usage with Mobile Spy and if the Target phone owner has a capped internet limit per month or per week and this is exceeded quicker than usual then this will naturally arouse suspicion in the device owner which is not what you want with this kind of software.

Support

Mobile Spy support is like their computer monitoring software - non existent.

Mobile Spy offers support via livechat and support tickets the same as their competitors.  We contacted them about issues with GPS location data not being uploaded and we were given a generic response to simply turn the feature off and on again. 

“Mobile Spy support staff are better at replying to tickets than livechat”

We noticed that we spoke to two different representatives, one for each support system, it could be that they do not give technical support over Livechat or it may be that there support staff are not as well trained or knowledgeable in the product they are supporting compared to their competitors.

Our experience with Mobile Spy support staff leads us to believe that they prefer to deal with technical issues via tickets instead of over Livechat.  We understand this completely as you get a more personal response and it can be used to answer the more technical kinds of support questions but your average customers want help now and so being given lacklustre help over livesupport will not leave a good impression upon the customer about Mobile Spy even if the software itself is functional.

Our Conclusion

Mobile Spy is available for Android and iPhone. This company offers two products with three different subscription options for each. Please note that our review is based on the Mobile Spy Premium 1-year subscription for Android.

Mobile Spy Plan
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Learn more about mSpy

For the latest updates and to learn even more about the Mobile Spy cell phone spy and cell phone monitoring, visit their website.

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