What do Verified, Revoked and Dark mean?

The three words the server can write

Verified is the healthy reading: Screen Time is granted and the shield Fold'em applied is still on the phone. Nothing happens, and nobody is told anything.

Revoked is the loud one, and it is reached two ways. The first is Screen Time permission being switched off, which the server checks before anything else in the reading, so a phone cannot talk its way out of the alarm by claiming something softer on a lower field. The second is Screen Time still being granted while the shield itself is gone and a lock is still running, which is the shape a tampered phone has.

Dark is what silence becomes. No reading of any kind for 24 hours and an hourly pass marks the phone Dark. Dark is not an accusation: a dead battery, airplane mode and a week in a drawer all look exactly like this, and the letter that goes out says so.

If you use Fold'em on more than one install, the worst state wins. Revoked outranks Dark, Dark outranks everything below it, and the card shows that worst one, so a second healthy install can never hide a broken first.

The states that are not an alarm

Two more readings exist and neither of them is a tamper alarm. After a reinstall or an iOS update the app pick has to be done again, and while that is outstanding the phone sits in a waiting state whose pass word is Checking in, so nobody is told protection was switched off in the middle of a repair. It is bounded rather than open ended: past a grace of 12 hours it escalates to Revoked and does alarm, so a repair that stalls can never be a quiet way to sit outside the block.

A phone sealed with the web shield alone, and whose own test of that shield does not come back positively blocked, reads Protection at risk. An undecided test is deliberately not treated as a pass. Below that sit the ordinary lifecycle words a card can carry when nothing is wrong at all: Subscription lapsed when the plan ran out, and Protection ended after a term is over and the release has landed.

What your keyholder can and cannot do with it

They can see it and they can talk to you. That is the whole list. A keyholder cannot approve an exit from their own phone: the only decision their link accepts is keeping the lock on, and an approval is given in person by scanning the code on their pass. They cannot shorten or cancel the wait that follows an approval either, because the record that wait is written on can only be changed by the person it belongs to.

They own no control over these two letters. The alert preferences setting is yours, it is reached from your app, and it covers milestones and elevated attempt counts. The tamper letters and the exit letters are not on it at all: they are always on, for everyone, and neither you nor your keyholder can mute them.

No amount of money reaches them. There is no spend figure in what the server sends a keyholder, on the pass, in the letters, or on their web link, so there is nothing for any of those surfaces to show by mistake. The full list of what a keyholder can see is written out once, on what a keyholder can see.

What this does not do

None of these words describe you. They describe one phone's protection: whether the permission is granted, whether the shield is applied, and whether the phone has spoken lately. Gambling somewhere Fold'em cannot reach does not turn a card, and neither does a bad day.

A calm word is not proof that the moment is calm. The card updates through a push, push is best effort, and a card can be behind. If it matters right now, open the pass to make it refresh, or send a message.

And a word is not a lever. Nothing on the pass changes your term, your apps, your sites or your wait; the words report the state and never set it.