> The Kids Category is a great way for people to easily find apps that are designed for children. If you want to participate in the Kids Category, you should focus on creating a great experience specifically for younger users. These apps must not include links out of the app, purchasing opportunities, or other distractions to kids unless reserved for a designated area behind a parental gate. Keep in mind that once customers expect your app to follow the Kids Category requirements, it will need to continue to meet these guidelines in subsequent updates, even if you decide to deselect the category. Learn more about parental gates.
> Apps in the Kids Category may not include third-party advertising or analytics. You should also pay particular attention to privacy laws around the world relating to the collection of data from children online. Be sure to review the Privacy section of these guidelines for more information.
It appears to only apply to apps in the "Kids Category" so Candy Crush and the like can just say they are "adult"/not-kid-games and continue to be used by kids (while showing them ads and tracking them).
> Keep in mind that once customers expect your app to follow the Kids Category requirements, it will need to continue to meet these guidelines in subsequent updates, even if you decide to deselect the category.
I love this. You can't just follow kids guidelines to build up your user-base and then drop it in favor of ads and analytics. Once you follow it, you have to continue to follow it.
> I love this. You can't just follow kids guidelines to build up your user-base and then drop it in favor of ads and analytics. Once you follow it, you have to continue to follow it.
Me too. It shows that Apple gives serious thought to this kind of stuff before they do it, and it comes from a philosophical position rather than what is expedient (or a Strategy Credit as Thompson might call it)
This is more proof that apps and games are just another form of media. There are the same issues and conundrums dealing with children's media, as there are for books and television.
I wish there would appear a 2019 version of Children's Television Workshop which would produce wonderful media for the children of today. (Is it already happening in some form?)
I'm kind of surprised by this thread. I understand that parents want to keep their kids away from a lot of topics and places, but I also remember how as a kid sought stuff like that out.
On YouTube it’s not just the presence of ads that’s the problem, it’s the type of ads.
My kids were watching an obviously kids-themed kids-friendly YouTube video and were shown an ad for Walking Dead, with graphic scary zombies. My 4yo was covering her eyes in fear.
Yeah I actually stopped allowing YouTube and YouTube Kids. YouTube has inappropriate ads, and YouTube Kids content is basically half ads in disguise (just people advertising toys and how they work).
Why can't things be like the Good Old Days when Raganwald was young. We watched Saturday Morning Cartoons, not played with apps.
Hmmm...
Now that I think about it, Saturday Morning Cartoons were filled with advertising for sugar and violent toys, some of which was clearly labeled as advertising.
I get the feeling, but you must realize that preventing your children from using YouTube is like being the parent who prevented their children from watching television.
You're teaching your children about censorship.
It's easier, sure, but maybe it's worth the effort to have a mature conversation with them instead of wholesale preventing access to their generation's largest media platform.
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 memories of all sorts of advertisements I viewed around that age, and my deconstruction of them. It is most certainly a skill that can be taught by then.
I'm not special. Most people take for granted what a child can accomplish and waste those precious developmental years treating them like idiots instead of people.
As for kids who can't even speak yet, I don't know why any parent would just plop them in front of a tablet device and YouTube. It's a literal propaganda platform and if your kid can't even form their own sentences then maybe you shouldn't be providing a direct link to bad actors who want to turn them into lifelong consumers.
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.
Where I grew up most kids were actively trying to not learn anything or at least seem to not be learning. Getting good grades was basically a social life killer, so I see your case as an exception. Hopefully times have changed, but I don't have kids yet so I have no idea how it is now.
I've seen a three year old kid smart enough to skip youtube ads by hitting the back button and restarting the video immediately afterwards. We, along with his parents and their friends, were quite impressed. Some kids reject ads naturally, because like us, they just aren't interested.
That doesn’t sound mature and also is dismissive of psychological manipulation, etc. It’ll be as effective as saying, “don’t be afraid of the dark, there are no monsters, that’s just your imagination.”
Somewhat fitting, because Plato presented the Cave Allegory specifically to illustrate "the effect of education and the lack of it on our nature".
However, the Allegory was about how our senses and perceptions limit our full understanding of the world, not the fact that things we see on a television or stage are not real.
The former is a philosophical concept, the latter is just good advice.
However, the Allegory was about how our senses and perceptions limit our full understanding of the world
That's my whole point. As a parent, you not only have the authority to tell your kids not to believe anything they see on a screen or hear through a speaker, you must raise them with that understanding. They will spend their entire lives with their senses and perceptions not only limited in a Platonic sense, but under active, continuous assault.
Plato wasn't making a case for discerning fact from fiction using obviously fictitious sources (literature, dramas, TV, your friend Rob, etc).
He was illustrating that our own senses and perceptions prohibit us from seeing reality in an objective nature.
He compared the escaped prisoner to an enlightened philosopher, who has learned to use his mind and abstract thinking in order to see what his eyes cannot.
Plato isn't saying, "Don't believe what you read in the newspaper," he is saying, "Don't trust your eyes and ears at all, because your entire reality might be false."
That doesn't very much help a kid understand not to believe what he sees in advertisements or to distrust friendly faces who want to control them.
Either we're talking past each other, or you haven't put all that much thought into the implications of the whole "shadows on the cave wall" metaphor. You're right in that Plato wasn't offering us advice for distinguishing fact from fiction. He was saying that as far as anyone can prove, it's all fiction.
Basically, I'm saying that instead of being prisoners, we have entered the cave voluntarily, and have delegated our senses to the wall. In addition to Plato's puppeteer, the one unavoidable agent of indirection between us and objective reality, we now have two, our senses and our screens.
If you treat screens and speakers as if they are literal manifestations of the cave wall, it's no longer an abstract philosophical point. I'm saying that the only responsible thing I can tell a child is to believe nothing they see on a screen until they're old enough to argue with me about it.
Agree,not sure what kind of logic they apply. My 2 years old often finds herself watching some creepy monster ad,while the video she just watched before was Peppa Pig or something.
Also don't forget the whole "elsagate" debacle where lots of kids videos were highly inappropriate and sexual content disguised with super hero costumes.
Would you let your children read random tabloid crap and ad flyers? No, you'd build a safe library filled with interesting, educational and valuable books.
So why won't you do this with digital media? An okay NAS costs about a same as year YT subscription, and there is a lot of great content.
One of the many reasons I'll be setting up a NAS and the only video streaming my kid will be allowed to use before ~10 will be a personally curated collection of youtube-dl'ed videos, on a device that's connected only to the house LAN (directly or via VPN when roaming).
The title, app description, screenshots, and icon give a lot of signals as to whether an app is targeting kids or not. In particular, icons and screenshots that use a lot of primary colors was a pretty good signal, though app description was the best feature.
These apps will be nearly impossible to monetize. No ads, but also basically no in-app purchases either. I doubt many children will see a parental gate and actually do what it asks. They'll just treat it like a dead-end and close the app to find something else to play with. This category will be entirely populated by totally free apps that are created solely for branding purposes or funded by NGOs to push an agenda, with a very small number of apps created by uncompromised people who sincerely want to make the world a better place for children.
> nearly impossible to monetize. No ads, but also basically no in-app purchases either.
How about a paid app? Charge what it costs to create once. The old model worked fine before the advent of IAP and adware. If the app is good, people would pay for it. Esp. if now there's a specific category for discovery!
Why do they ban third-party advertising in particular? It seems like advertising should be allowed as long as it's display only with no outward information flow. Basically ads equivalent OTA television or magazine ads should be allowed.
In general, I believe it's based on the belief that children in partiular don't yet have the necessary mental tools to be able to properly analyze content -- basically, that they're influenced by media to a much higher degree than adults.
> Basically ads equivalent OTA television or magazine ads should be allowed
I would guess that proponents of this approach also feel that the contents of TV/magazine ads should be strictly controlled (and probably they are -- I'm not sure what the exact regulations around these are, but I am sure it's much harder to publish a blatantly misleading magazine or TV ad, without consequences to the advertiser or the network/magazine, than it is to publish one online).
Almost all cartoons aimed at kids hope to make money on related merchandise. A lot of animated shows were cancelled because while the ratings were good, they skewed toward older teens and adults that didn't buy toys. Two that come to mind are "Young Justice" and the original "Teen Titans". Cartoon Network specifically made "Teen Titans Go!" to skew younger.
This isn't a new thing, they killed off most of the Transformers in the 80s movie so they could introduce a new line of characters/toys.
I think this ability to filter is less a binary switch and more of a scale - people of any age can have trouble resisting advertising and so we just generally need to rethink our stance on what sorts of advertising we allow.
They’re requiring that the app publisher has editorial control over the ads that appear next to their content. This is a shift back to how things work in pre-internet media and ensures that any damage done by an inappropriate ad (whether by Apple, a government, or market forces) falls squarely on someone that had both the responsibility and means to block said problematic ad.
Honestly all advertising targeted to children should be banned. It's just not fair. Children don't stand a chance against marketing crafted by adults. You're pitting the mind of a child against that of a trained, professional, adult marketer. The kid is their clay to be molded.
The fact that so much advertising barely works is the basis of Google's entire business model. The idea that adverts are all made by masters of psychological manipulation is laughable - most of it is considered successful of it just manages to get the name noticed and remembered at all.
This seems to be getting missed, but those kids apps are serving ads for adults. Google has gone way out of their way to make it confusing to block mobile ads (you used to have to add a blacklist domain.) Last year they removed support for that and required advertisers to check an option within the ad campaign. Earlier this year they removed that option.
This is a win for advertisers, a loss for publishers and ad networks making money from mis-targeted ads.
> Honestly all advertising targeted to children should be banned
When it comes to TV, some countries like Sweden and Norway do this. It seems the legislation hasn't caught up to the Internet though, and it may be difficult when the content comes from abroad.
Presumably because third party insertion doesn't give the app creators sufficient control over what's shown. This happens all the time. Forbes.com starts serving malware and then cry
"we didn't know! the third party guys just put whatever in that box!"
So it's not (just) the outward flow of information, but the additional policing burden of a separate inward flow of graphics.
Because no ad network is trustworthy. It avoids stories like "developer's labour of love banned over ad network that resold space to ad network that resold space to ad network that put an inappropriate ad".
Marco Arment created his own ad platform that he curates for the Overcast podcast player partially for that reason and he didn't want random binary blobs shipping with his code.
Children are not mature enough to understand that advertisements are lies meant to sell products, and can believe the content of the advertisements are true.
This is harmful to society, particularly as young children are not capable of making purchasing decisions anyways - this is adversarial brainwashing of the most vulnerable.
I'm interpreting this as third party targeting, not that you can't use a third party handle the process of targeting, serving, and billing ads.
If they are saying that the game company has to have their own ad platform that basically means only Google and Facebook will be able to release ad supported child targeted games on iOS in the future, which doesn't really make any sense to me.
It sounds simple but one of the biggest frustrations is that kids accidentally click the ads which take you out of the app into something else. And constantly get confused.
Hence it also requires the apps not to have external links etc.
Obviously, but where do you want to go with that? Are you suggesting that because kids can use any app on a phone that all tracking and ads should be banned?
With all due respect, this is the kind of self-evident truth that I find it weird people use as "yeah, is that what you REALLY want?" Yes, that is what I want. I think society would be much better off without this kind of rubbish, and stuff the financial backers of this amoral race to the optimised bottom.
I realize you are not the original poster but it sounds like your view would be the same even if we lived in a world without children. In this case it’s not really about helping children it is about advancing your desired outcome and that annoys me a bit.
The bigger issue is do you really think things will be better this way. Services like Google Search, Maps, newspapers would all become pay-walled. I honestly would personally like this outcome, as I have enough income to pay an extra $20-30 / month for these features. However for those in poverty 15-20% in the US and much more world wide this would be a major hardship. I really don’t think we want all of these currently ad supported things to be pay only in future, which is the inevitable outcome of banning advertising.
OK, perhaps that was a little intemperate. But "Are you suggesting that because kids can use any app on a phone that all tracking and ads should be banned?" felt a bit like a conversation where someone is arguing against the death penalty and someone else says "Yeah, so you want murderers to go free?" There are lots of other possibilities, and if advertising and tracking is a on a spectrum from respectful to abusive we're currently way, way over towards the abusive end.
But in monetary terms, what do these “free” services cost to various populations? The advertisers believe that paying for the service is turning them a profit, so someone is paying more for the advertised products than they used to. Is this a case of people with disposable income subsidizing everyone else, or one of manipulating vulnerable populations to spend their money unwisely?
In reality, it is neither people with disposable income subsidizing everyone else nor manipulating vulnerable populations to spend their money unwisely.
Much like with trade, advertising isn't necessarily a zero sum game. Nor is it the same experience for everyone. I suspect your perception of advertising is distorted by your own context.
A high income individual might see advertising as targeting their disposable income and attempting to get them to spend more of it... because that's what will really move the needle for the advertiser with that customer. But it's a totally different experience for advertising's impact on low-income consumers.
Amongst lower income folks little if any of their spending is disposable income; that's not going to move the needle for an advertiser. What might move the needle is the non-disposable income, particular for staple consumer packaged goods (CPG) like food, clothing, cleaning products, etc.
The goal isn't to get lower income folks to spend more of their income at all, because that isn't an option. The only way to reliably get low income consumers to spend more money is to give them more money to spend. In most cases, all or almost all their income is going to be spent even without advertising. When you are hungry and on a limited budget, an ad isn't going to convince you to spend more money on food, but it might change your mind about what you decide to eat. So advertisers aren't trying to convince poorer folks to spend more of their disposable income, but rather to choose to spend their non-disposable income with the advertiser instead of a competitor.
While advertisers may be attempting to manipulate an audience, lower income folks aren't so vulnerable. You can show them as many ads as you want for yachts, they aren't going to buy one. The more vulnerable audiences are those with more choices, not fewer.
Stronger players in a market tend to be able to afford more on marketing, which can mean that advertising ensures those consumers are aware of the stronger players in the market.
Consumers consequently have learned to treat extensive marketing as an easily detectable proxy signal for that strength, which, despite its pitfalls, is often more reliable than other signals (unfortunately, targeting can undermine this a bit by making an advertising seem more pervasive to a targeted audience than it really is, but overall it remains more true than not).
Brand awareness advertising in particular tends to increase the importance of providing a successful product experience to those lower income populations, because those populations are more risk adverse to a disappointing experience (one can't just buy more food if the stuff one spent the last of one's paycheck on turns out to be terrible). Consequently, even though lower-income consumers might have a lower expected customer lifetime value, an advertiser might be more concerned that a negative experience with them, as the damage to the brand image might be far more lasting.
If you have a non-staple CPG good, your revenue isn't going to be coming from consumer's non-disposable income, so you're going to naturally disenfranchise consumers who don't have much if any disposable income. You won't care about their needs or their complaints. Maybe if you are creative, you might increase margins on your product so you can find some way to give away your product to those without disposable income, thereby having people with disposable income subsidize everyone else. Unless...
...you make your product ad supported. Now you might derive much of your revenue stream by appealing to a customer base with no disposable income, because you are getting paid by an advertiser with a product that might target non-disposable income... and even if those consumers are being influenced by the advertising, they aren't going to be spending money they wouldn't spend anyway (not a choice available to them), and while it is far from certain, they are more likely to be getting better value for that money.
So one can argue that advertising makes advertisers and ad supported products more sensitive to the needs of lower income populations who do not have disposable income.
I didn’t intend to signal a blanket disagreement with ‘lotu, but rather to indicate that their position rests on assumptions that don’t necessarily hold for all cases.
I actually agree with most everything you say here, except for grouping all advertising together. Some ads are generally helpful for all the reasons you list here; others are incredibly predatory. To move the conversation forward, we need to move past “ads are good” vs “ads are evil” and start talking about the benefits and drawbacks of particular kinds of ads.
What Apple’s doing here seems like a good start to me— they’re reinforcing the idea that (app) publishers can and should exercise editorial control over the ads their app displays, and having somebody to hold accountable for bad decisions is a prerequisite for any meaningful discussion of what is and isn’t appropriate.
Yeah, I don't have a lot of disagreement with your points either...
I didn't intend to group all ads together, but rather speak broadly of the aggregate effect of advertisers. No question there are predatory ads.
I would say though that publishers can and should exercise editorial control over ads & analytics in their apps... even if they are using 3rd parties. What tends to happen is that they choose NOT to in all but the most egregious cases (and even then...), because of the impact on their bottom line.
The reduction of tracking and ads is a good thing, but that there is going to be a FAANG that is explicitly encouraging this is great news.
I would prefer if the market itself forced out tracking and ads. Provide a space for it and that space can compete with everything else and if we're lucky will wildly outcompete the competition.
This is the kind of walled garden I want to see. One with high walls and a door.
The market is never going to do that at large - but I hope someone somewhere manages to kill tracking and third party data-reselling into non-existence.
> The market is never going to do that at large - but I hope someone somewhere manages to kill tracking and third party data-reselling into non-existence.
Overall the market is moving away from third-party now, as it's simply a lot less effective. Everyone in the industry wants to be working with first-party data.
If you think about it Apple is basically the corporate manifestation of GDPR. They can just decide whatever they want and everyone has to comply or get out. In the real world someone has to file a complaint with the DPC, it gets investigated, gets appealed for years.
That's correct, and quite terrible IMO - I'd prefer to have a non-private entity serving as the gate keeper to walled gardens like these... or just not have walled gardens.
If you're saying that it's terrible because government haven't stepped in to legislate rather than relying on corporate entities like Apple to protect privacy, I agree.
> The reduction of tracking and ads is a good thing, but that there is going to be a FAANG that is explicitly encouraging this is great news.
It would be a mistake to think this is going to reduce tracking and ads. What it will do is reduce third party tracking and ads. The effect will likely be an increase in poor quality track & ads, as well as encourage consolidation in the mobile app space as those FAANG companies can provide higher quality tracking & ads then small startups who cannot invest as much in their own tracking & ad implementation.
> This is the kind of walled garden I want to see. One with high walls and a door.
It'll be a walled garden alright, but I think not quite what you imagine. It'll be a less competitive market place with far greater barriers to entry.
Then we can go back to the time where we simply paid for software with money instead of with privacy (such as tracking or PII) or time/focus (advertising).
If there is one company of FAANG who's up for this task -and can beat Google at their game- it is Apple.
> Then we can go back to the time where we simply paid for software with money instead of with privacy (such as tracking or PII) or time/focus (advertising).
A time when the digital divide was vast & software companies had no reason to heed the interests of those without disposable income... ;-)
The digital divide was vast because computers cost thousands of dollars and the Internet was something available only to corporations and universities. As a result, most of the paid software out there was targeted at rich users for professional work and priced accordingly.
BTW, how are ads incentivizing user-focused development? Look at the Top 100 apps in any apps store, and tell me they're not virtual clones of Clash of Clans, Plants v Zombies and Candy Crush. Every developer is heeding self-interest first.
So, I wouldn't say that ads incentivize user-focused development. I'm saying the incentivize paying attention to the needs/interests/desires/etc. of lower-income users. Without ads, almost all software shops would be better off ignoring that market segment entirely.
Do you really think you'd have so many developers, competing so aggressively with each other in an attempt to appeal to millions of people with a collective negative disposable income, the bulk of which is probably not spent on software at all? No. Even if you were hugely successful, you'd be lucky to get enough income to pay a developer's salary.
Is this actually true? Jailbreaks haven't been persistent in the face of updates in a long while, so for devices kept up to date it's possible to lock down an iPhone fairly hard. I haven't investigated how parent control compares to full MDM, but the supervision capabilities now in iOS [1] are pretty powerful. For better and for worse of course, that kind of control over user devices, particularly in the context of parents and children, is definitely a double edged sword. But compared to typical computers I don't think it should be lightly dismissed either as something kids can just get around. They aren't open systems.
> 1.3 Kids Category
> The Kids Category is a great way for people to easily find apps that are designed for children. If you want to participate in the Kids Category, you should focus on creating a great experience specifically for younger users. These apps must not include links out of the app, purchasing opportunities, or other distractions to kids unless reserved for a designated area behind a parental gate. Keep in mind that once customers expect your app to follow the Kids Category requirements, it will need to continue to meet these guidelines in subsequent updates, even if you decide to deselect the category. Learn more about parental gates.
> Apps in the Kids Category may not include third-party advertising or analytics. You should also pay particular attention to privacy laws around the world relating to the collection of data from children online. Be sure to review the Privacy section of these guidelines for more information.
It appears to only apply to apps in the "Kids Category" so Candy Crush and the like can just say they are "adult"/not-kid-games and continue to be used by kids (while showing them ads and tracking them).