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“Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

developer.apple.com

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Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#231

Post by bredren »

low_poly_shiba wrote: post #221
Guest0918231 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a user-content website, and hate advertising too. But, the website costs $15,000 a year in expenses to run, and community donations bring in $3,000. Advertising generates $50,000. I stay with safe ad categories (no drugs, alcohol, gambling, adult content, etc), and use standard display sizes. No audio ads, background ads, popups, etc. I'm sure the site could generate twice the revenue with background advertisem…

Never ran something like this, but always wondered: why not have a visible counter saying "this is what it costs to run, please donate!" and let people donate to keep it up? Some kinda big progress bar somewhere or whatever. How do you know it "doesn't work with community donations" when you have no measures to help deal with the tragedy of the commons?

I ran a content forum and blog that needed $6k at cost back in pre vps days and raised it several years in a row off community donations.

I refused to show ads because they were all ticket brokers / scalpers.

It is actually kind of a pain and takes work to raise money this way. For me, I had to do a personal appeal, email drips, and I even added membership status indicators to usernames and gave access to “exclusive” content.

It did work though with the thermometer thingy and some pluck.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#232

Post by mc32 »

soulofmischief wrote: post #217
mc32 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you have a mature conversation with children who are unable to process (due to age) certain advanced concepts like marketing, advertising, monetization, irrelevancy, deception, exploitation, etc? I don’t think they’re talking adolescents but rather toddlers and young children.

It isn't an easy conversation, and it's not one that happens over one discussion. It's something you have to actively teach them to understand while growing up. When I was three I had already developed the basic sense that people can lie and that advertisements are made by people. I had already taught myself how to read and was reading at a junior high level before even entering preschool. I have clear and distinct m…

To me your passage itself is an indicator that that’s not the level most three year olds are at. If it were then preschool would expect more from them and society would expect more and psychology would tell us these things. But they are all at odds with your anecdote, which while sincere, I don’t think we can generalize to the population.

No, Google/YouTube with all their resources and experts should do better.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#234

Post by cyrksoft »

gnopgnip wrote: post #228
cyrksoft wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the problem about Apple doing that? It's their platform. You can go use whatever else you like, nobody forces you to use their system.

Apple force's you to use their platform if you have an Apple device. You can't install fdroid, or anything else.

But YOU chose to buy the device. Nobody forced you to buy an Apple device.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#235

Post by soulofmischief »

mc32 wrote: post #232
soulofmischief wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't an easy conversation, and it's not one that happens over one discussion. It's something you have to actively teach them to understand while growing up. When I was three I had already developed the basic sense that people can lie and that advertisements are made by people. I had already taught myself how to read and was reading at a junior high level before even entering preschool. I have clear and distinct m…

To me your passage itself is an indicator that that’s not the level most three year olds are at. If it were then preschool would expect more from them and society would expect more and psychology would tell us these things. But they are all at odds with your anecdote, which while sincere, I don’t think we can generalize to the population. No, Google/YouTube with all their resources and experts should do better.

> To me your passage itself is an indicator that that’s not the level most three year olds are at.

I think we can focus more heavily on pre-scholastic education without raising our expectations. No one ever expected me to do anything; my family tree is extremely anti-intellectual.

Despite the lack of expectations, I found the motivation to educate myself. The main driving motivation was fear of not being in control of myself or of being controlled by others, which I found knowledge could combat.

We don't typically instill this motivation in children, because largely as parents we just either don't know any better or don't have the motivation ourselves.

But I don't think that the average performance of a preschooler is indicative of the potential average performance. Too many factors come into play.

So without raising expectations, we can increase our attention to our children's developmental years, and instill within them the proper motivations by example.

Again, it isn't easy. And you're right, it doesn't completely generalize. Every person is unique.

But I'm shooting for the average here. On average, we take for granted the learning capacity of children, and take for granted how much the early phases of their childhood impacts the rest of their life.

To bring it back around, YouTube itself, in addition to tons of other online resources, has been a fundamental tool in my education. I would not nearly be where I am today without it. I can only imagine what I could have accomplished if YouTube as it is today existed in my youth.

I don't think we should be denying that to children.

I agree that Google needs to do better. It's that, or outside regulation will eventually creep in and turn the internet into the new TV.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#236

Post by captainredbeard »

joegahona wrote: post #233

I don't mean to be pedantic, but I'd argue that Apple copy writers should have used "shall not" rather than "may not" in this text. The latter is ambiguous and could mean "perhaps they won't..."

Apple's copy writers didn't write it, their lawyers did.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#237

Post by jm20 »

We have a decently popular kids app, Kodable, that helps kids learn to code. While this is something we’re mostly already in compliance with and have never actually included ads, I worry about the analytics.

We use anonymous analytics to track things like user completion through level funnels. Nothing nefarious about it, if one of our levels is too hard for kids and there’s a big drop off from one to the next, we want to know about it and tweak it. I worry how this will effect stuff like that, but I also wonder how you can even differentiate “proper” analytics usage.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#238

Post by edmundsauto »

dllthomas wrote: post #227
bunderbunder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw. From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case agai…

> the only people who try to mount a case that the answer is yes are people whose livelihoods depend on everyone being OK with ads. Playing devil's advocate... Advertising helps the world in the case where a person has a need and they see an ad that informs them of a way they hadn't considered to address that need, and that solution proves to be better than available alternatives. ... I'm sure that happens ever. I am…

Another argument would be that advertising allowed the internet to develop as it is, to the scale it is. It's impossible to separate the accessibility, progress, UX, and information available from the core business model that enabled so much of it.

If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords? Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage? Think what you will, but Google has developed a ton of impressive technology and open sourced quite a bit of it; they have been much more open stewards than I would expect if AOL and IBM and Microsoft built out the internet.

(They have also given everyone a ton of value without asking for money from users -- it's important to not underestimate how far we've come on the backs of the ad dollar).

It might be a faustian bargain, or it might not be.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#239

Post by shivo »

bunderbunder wrote: post #225
meowface wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the app market, but I run a few user-content-oriented websites which get millions of monthly hits. They're funded only by community donations. I decided to never add any ads to any of them. I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. (In my case, my websites are aimed at adults and there are no concerns about children seeing inappropriate content.) It's not about the morality or even the…

> I'm not sure I morally disagree with advertising or tracking. This seems to me like one of those spots where one's approach to ethics can play a big part in the conclusions you draw. From a sort of Kant-style, deontological perspective, where you have to be able to say with confidence that something is morally wrong in order to make much of a judgment at all about it, yeah, it seems hard to mount a strong case agai…

I don't have a moral objection to ads either. However, in third party advertisers and trackers are, at this moment in time, practising extremely egregious, sneaky advertising e.g full screen racy ads which have a close button that triggers Javascript to load more ads.

Re: “Apps intended for kids may not include third-party advertising or analytics”

#240

Post by notatoad »

move-on-by wrote: post #115
penagwin wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dislike tracking as much as anyone, but can you really fault them for using Google analytics? It's not like PBS choose to use them "to profit off the viewers".

This is the problem, its just convenient and free. People are not thinking about the costs to the end consumer - which in this case is our children. I don't really fault PBS, but I do fault the advertising companies for our general lack of privacy and control over our own data. I also fault the politicians for turning a blind eye to it. I hope Apple's new strategy to go after privacy pays off in a big way and more co…

I think most people do realize the cost, and are simply unconcerned with giving google such critical information as "kids watch sesame street".
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