Is a co-parenting app accepted as evidence in UK and Irish courts?

It is one of the most common questions separated parents ask: if things end up in court, do the messages in my co-parenting app actually count? The short answer is that they usually can be put before the court, but no app is automatically accepted, and how much weight a record carries is always for the court to decide.

In family proceedings in England and Wales, and in Ireland, communication between parents can be submitted as evidence. In practice, two things matter most:

• Relevance. The record has to be relevant to the issue the court is deciding, such as arrangements for the children or a dispute about what was agreed.
• Authenticity. The court needs to be able to trust that the record is genuine and has not been altered. A record that is clearly timestamped and cannot be edited or deleted after sending is easier to rely on than a screenshot that could have been changed.

This is why the well-known co-parenting apps emphasise tamper-proof, timestamped records. It is not that the app itself is approved, it is that a trustworthy record is more useful to a court.

ParenThing keeps a clear, timestamped record of messages and agreements between co-parents, and your data is held in the EU. It does not, and could not honestly, promise that any record will be admitted or given particular weight in your case, because that is the court's decision. If you may need records for court or mediation, keep them factual and get legal advice on your own situation.

Authenticity is the part most apps describe and few make checkable. It is worth understanding the difference, because it is the difference a solicitor or a judge will care about.

In ParenThing, every message is fingerprinted when it is sent, using a SHA-256 hash of its content, its sender and its timestamp. Messages cannot be edited or deleted afterwards. If a single character of a stored message were altered, the fingerprint would no longer match, and the mismatch would show. That is what tamper-evident means in practice: not a promise that nothing changed, but a mechanism that would reveal it if something had.

On top of that, a certified evidence pack carries a verification code. Anyone holding the pack, including a solicitor, a mediator or the court, can enter that code at app.parenthing.ie/verify with no account and no login. The page confirms whether the pack is authentic and unaltered, and returns only that confirmation: the date it was generated and the role of the professional who produced it. It shows no family content to whoever enters the code.

Who can produce one. Certified packs are generated by a connected professional, such as your mediator, solicitor or family support worker, not by a parent on their own. Connecting a professional to your family is free on every plan, including the free one, and you can withdraw their access at any time. That is deliberate: a record is more useful when the person certifying it is not the person it benefits.