AppStore Reviews Should Be Stricter

It has been absolutely fascinating to see my 3 year old interact with his grandparents as he "helps" them play Scrabble on their iPad.

Together they decide to watch in-app ads; try installing some free-to-play game apps that seem like they might be amusing for an adult to show a child how they use; and otherwise explore the bounds of what you can do & learn on the modern walled-garden Internet. The grandparents are pretty media savvy ("this is an advertisement -- they want to sell you something") but are overall a little less conservative than the parents about screen time and are occasionally willing to, for example, try new apps that turn out to be scammy shovelware.

I've been thinking about getting the kid a non-networked desktop PC with a keyboard and seeing whether he derives any joy from the kind of basic, actual applications I grew up with -- a word processor program and a printer; literally QBASIC and gorillas.bas; etc.; with the understanding that this is an amusing anachronistic toy.

To be honest the biggest thing I'm trying to think about with the kids is not so much about screen time but about dealing with information more generally. Ads work really well on kids, but so does any organic, confidently stated information.

How do you convey the idea that that "just because you read something online doesn't mean it's true"? What happens when adults in your life (including sometimes your own parents) don't model a safe level of skepticism?

Not trying to convince you otherwise, but rather maybe explain some of the rationale for prodigy using the freemium model.

Education is a hard market to break into and build adoption of a new product. Budgets are very constrained or virtually nonexistent... in America some teachers even have to purchase classroom supplies or tools with their own wages.

With that in mind (and maybe other reasons that I do not know), Prodigy took the decision to offer their service to schools and teachers at no cost, otherwise it would’ve been much more difficult to build adoption in that market. It’s very hard to convince teachers, schools and boards to allocate budget on a new initiative, when they are already spread so thin.

Now to build a service like prodigy, it takes game artists and developers to build the game, web developers to build the website and teacher dashboards, teachers to build the prodigy math curriculum, and then all the supporting teams too; data scientists, product owners, testers, operations, etc.

They either need some sort of investment or revenue stream to make the company run; and this is where they adopted a freemium model.

I agree. So, rather than app store review filters, consider these proposed "App Store Review Guidelines", that I attempted to phrase in ASRG tone:

- Games should not charge money for progress or performance. For example, games that introduce slowdowns for non-paying players or that restrict the number of plays per day for free players will be rejected.

- Games that repeatedly show advertisements must not interrupt gameplay to do so and must offer an appropriately-priced in-app purchase to disable them. For example, modal dialogs and inappropriately expensive subscriptions will be rejected.

Note that I didn't try to rewrite Notification spam or Privacy, because those are a reporting problem that has to be solved at the iOS level. The guidelines are already hostile to misrepresentation of such things, and I think it would be better for iOS to offer "This app sends inappropriate notifications" and "This app violates my privacy" reporting mechanisms somehow.

I also have my own bone to pick here:

- Games must not use in-app purchases for gambling or other chance-based rewards. All items shown as available in a given purchase must be provided at time of purchase.

When I was kid in the 80's and 90's, I had unfettered access to my computer. I had video game systems. I had portable video games systems. I ran an adult BBS when I was 13.

There was no controls at all in those times. You still had the option to give your kid a device or not -- same as now. And you can connect that to the Internet or not -- same as now. But now you can actually have much more fine-grained control -- it doesn't have to be all or nothing. But you still have to decide and I don't see why Apple needs to make all the decisions when I have the controls.

> You are still many zero days from a hosed machine.

It's definitely not as easy as you make it sound -- the sky isn't falling that fast or we'd all be screwed. And I block web sites as well.

Aside from offering the ability to collect IAP in general I’m not sure what the case against Apple is here. Did they do something specific to incentivize the creation of these kinds of games?