I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also.
Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time. Its not always about money. At times I get contacted by players, how they love the game and how it has been part of their childhood etc. Some very moving messages, worth more then a few additional bucks from ads and I feel much better because players aren't exposed to random ads, pictures and messages.
The learning for me was that I will never work on anything that uses ads as source of income, this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook.
Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations? (children in your instance)
I have my professional job developing software solutions for clients on a contractual base, but for a period after I graduated university I dabbled in mobile development and made the decision during that time that I'd never bloat my crappy apps with ads or tracking. I can't particularly articulate why I'm against that business method as a whole, but something always felt wrong in subjecting people to tracking/advertisements for my own monetary gain... if I'm not producing something worth paying outright for then I'm not going to skim pennies off the privacy of my users.
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 tracking for me. I personally don't even mind tracking all that much (though I know I'm in a tiny minority on HN).
I just, simply, really fucking hate looking at ads. They're annoying and distracting and ugly and will make any decent-looking website look tacky and dumb. And I thought, if I would never want to browse my own website and see ads, why should I subject other users to them? Sure, I use an ad blocker, and most of my users probably do, too, but I'm sure there are many who don't. And there're also the practical concerns about ads affecting page load performance and bandwidth consumption, but that's a more minor consideration.
I also try to avoid commercials and video pre-roll ads (even those HBO ones advertising other HBO shows), and I skip past all ad/sponsor parts of podcasts and YouTube videos. I can only think of a single time in my life that an ad led to a purchase, and that was from a YouTuber I liked doing an absurd segment that unexpectedly turned the entire 10 minute video into an over-the-top ad for the sponsor, and it was funny and well-written and well-executed and was something I was already planning to get and seemed to be a good deal and a good product, so I actually did buy it a week or so later. That's one exception out of hundreds of thousands or millions, though.
I admit I do feel what might be a kind of revulsion at the thought of huge companies like Google and Facebook making advertising their primary revenue source, or the thought of some of our world's top minds being paid amazing salaries to figure out how to get more people to look at and click ads. But I think it just comes down to me not wanting to see or hear them. They waste my time and/or much of my visual field, and are an eye/ear-sore, and I'd like to do unto others as I would want them to do unto me.
> 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 against ads.
From a more Bentham-style utilitarian approach, it's easier: Are ads and tracking a net benefit or detriment to people in general? AFAICT, 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.
Then there's the "do unto others" approach you get from virtue ethics. The GP's take of, "I'm not going to monetize with ads because ads annoy me" reminds me of that.
It's interesting, because, if you could paint those three approaches to ethics with a broad brush, the latter two would be, "Let's try and make things as nice for everyone as possible," while the first would be more like, "As long as it's not actually evil, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
> 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 skeptical that it's enough to net positive.
I wish I saw more ads for local entertainment options. Preferably diverse. I don't need 100 ads all telling me to do the same thing at different venues. But an ad informing me that hey, this weekend there will be a model train convention or if you'd rather there is a big chess boxing game you could go see. That'd be cool.
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.
IBM and Microsoft both contribute more to open source than Google. In fact, the explosion of the internet occured during their primes moreso than Google.
What Google really pushed forward was SaaS and the free price tag was a trick to make it seem as good as open source.
But when it comes down to it, Gmail is worse than Windows 7 when it comes to user power. At least you can use windows 7 without a constant connection to Microsoft.
Microsoft is in the open source game to domimate it. They want to be in a position where you can't realistically run an open source project without their involvement. Their recent moves around github all point in that direction.
IBM has more of a consultancy perspective: they want rheur business customers to pay for services provided on top of existing solutions. And open source platforms make it easier to sell custom extensions.
These are valid counter-arguments; my intention wasn't to litigate the merits of each claim, just to mention that as the parent had trouble conceiving of other options than 1.
I will say, however, that your claims would be challenging to verify or refute -- quantity of contributions may not be a good metric, and it appears your Gmail/Win7 comparison is based on a single dimension (user power) which is further limited to one dimension of that dimension (whether it requires a constant connection).
You may be correct, but your comment didn't provide much of an argument to get me to think more of the problem. It just seemed like you needed to negate my (also unsubstantiated but admittedly devil's advocate position) out of some sense of anti-google sentiment.
I think you really had a good piece of feedback going until you made it personal in the last paragraph. It does not endear you to the reader and from an intellectual perspective I don't understand why you'd finish an otherwise well-structured response like that. If it was out of anger, I would expect it in the front. Can you explain what made you write it like this?
> If ads had never been allowed, would search be more like AOl's keywords?
Not sure how that's related to ads. I've been online since 1996, and AOL wasn't available in my country, although did get those AOL trial diskettes with my copy of C&C: Red Alert.
Xcite, Yahoo, Altavista, Askjeeves and others simply had a search box and an alphabetical directory of sites. I didn't hear about Google until 1999 when I came across a Time Magazine article about it, and there were ads on the internet well before then.
> Would we still be limited to 10MB in email storage?
Are you sure ads are related?
If you calculate the cost of 10MB of hard drive space in the good old days of Yahoo mail, adjust for inflation, calculate how much hard drives you can buy now for that money, you’ll get at least 100GB. I don’t think average gmail mailbox approaches that size.
Originally, in the days of doubleclick, before Google cornered the internet ad marktet, I absolutely hated online ads. They were annoying, distracting and intrusive.
Then Google conquered the market with very low-key unobtrusive ads, and I was fine with them. I had no problem with tracking, because it lead to more relevant and less annoying ads.
But in the past couple of years, tracking and ads are touching on absolutely everything I do online. Google for an accountant, and for the next month all videos on Youtube have ads for accountants. Read an article on something, and suddenly all ads are about that.
And with these ad companies also controlling our social media and our online search results, suddenly my entire view of the internet, and therefore my view of the world, becomes controlled by people who want to show me ads to sell me stuff.
It's too controlling and too intrusive, and I have no control over it. Maybe if they make it more transparent and gave me more control over what they show me, I'd be fine with it, but at the moment it's too much.
Only seeing informative ads about things I'm interested in is good. Having my entire experience controlled by people who want to monetize my information is not.
The problem I have with the anti-advertising crowd is that none of them take their philosophy to the required ethical conclusion: Stop using free ad-supported resources. Google and Facebook are easy examples of this. The position would be far more ethically aligned if they unplugged from all ad-supported products and services.
Just because someone, either by choice or necessity (have you tried to stop using all ad-supported resources? You've practically gotta be a hermit) participates in something they find morally wrong, doesn't cease to make it morally wrong.
The morality, or lack thereof is your perspective and yours only, it is not an absolute fact.
What is a fact is that some are perfectly content having others pay for services they use while, at the sane time, trying to weave a fake moral framework with which to justify their actions.
Nobody is forcing anyone to use these sites, and you don’t have to.
Advertising is a pollution on social space. A deliberately attention-grabbing advertisement represents a very real theft from people, and a public space covered in it, even more so. Advertising is designed to exploit inherent human weaknesses and biases, to manipulate behaviour. It's abusive. Seen from this position, Google is an abuser.
The required ethical conclusion is not "inconvenience yourself so you can be more respectable", it's far more extreme than that. What about saving other people from it, or activism to ban it completely, like we restrict noise pollution and physical manipulation of strangers?
Using ad-supported services and an ad-blocker might be unethical theft, but the anti-advertising position is against-adverts not how to treat Google fairly; it's not about being "ethically aligned".
If, when clicking on a hyperlink, I were presented with a landing page where I'd be presented a diagram of what the page would look like, in order to inform me that 70% of the initial data mass of the page would be chumbox, and that there'd be a video that expands out of the middle of the article and starts playing automatically as I scroll past, etc etc, then I'd happily rely on that instead of an adblocker. But that's not what happens - instead, I click the link, and the page immediately starts eating up my data budget (which costs me money, yo) and attempting to track me. My best defense here is to use some sort of adblocker.
At which point, the equilibrium point seems to be, some sites I don't even necessarily know they're trying to serve ads to me. Other sites give me a little popup saying, "Disable adblock or GTFO," so I politely GTFO.
It's less possible to do anything on that front with outdoor advertising; annoying as a lot of it is, I can't very well stop consuming the world itself.
TV, radio, stuff like that, that's at least getting easy nowadays.
That's not how I think about it, though. It's not about the principles of a website using ads or issues with advertising companies. I just personally don't want to see them. If I'm using a Google service, I generally see no or almost no ads because I use uBlock Origin, so I'm not bothered at all. And I actually do subscribe to YouTube Premium because there's no decent way to block ads in the mobile apps, as far as I know.
I do like Google's services, and I do understand they couldn't exist without ads, so I know there's a little bit of cognitive dissonance there. But for me, if I can block the ads, then I'm not going to complain. The only time I boycott a site is if they lock you out of the site if they detect you're using an ad blocker. (I'm okay with small messages politely suggesting you turn it off if they don't otherwise restrict access to the site. I always ignore them, though.)
It isn’t cognitive dissonance. You are using something others are paying for and don’t wat to be bothered. If you don’t like the add, don’t use the service.
The alternative ethical conclusion is to pay for the services. I would if I could, but a lot of these guys don't offer this because they want a nice broad stroke of people in their data pie.
And that's just where these services are being up front. There's a lot of sneaky underhand tracking that goes on without even being aware of it.
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 advertisements.
Anyway, I just wanted to give a slightly different perspective. Although I hate advertising as much as you, my site doesn't work with community donations. So, I use advertising to keep it alive, and try to draw a line somewhere I think is appropriate.
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.
Yeah I suspect it could work with some savvy and pluck. I have some ideas that will probably lead me to face off with this issue myself, I'm kinda looking forward to it.
Or with that, a visible running revenue counter with a probability that ads will show. If the site generates $3k/year and costs $15k/year 20% of the page loads would be ad free.
I don't blame GP for wanting to make some money - they're certainly putting in some otherwise unpaid hours. But a "Target 0" system could work well for some communities.
Have you ever worked at a nonprofit? I have, my whole career, lots of them. Don't say this. Nonprofits use strategy after strategy, tested and untested and rational and intuitive, to increase donations in every way they can. They know what they're doing. Do they get it 100% right? No. Do they do it all day, every day, and know a ton about it? Yes.
I can't tell you how many times someone has said to me "why do you guys send out those letters? Everyone just throws them out." Do you know why? Because we see how much they cost, and how much they make, and it's worth it.
This guy is actually running a community site that's paying for itself. Do not question him, especially by proposing one tiny little strategy among the thousands that might work.
I don't think this advice of "if you haven't done it you can't criticize or ask questions about it" is very good. It would bar me from commenting on and criticizing Michael Bay movies, so no thank you.
I'd also like to know if the guy shuts off the ads when he makes more than is needed for maintenance costs.
1. That's my bill for hosting and bandwidth expenses. I obviously need to consider the cost of my time which is not included in that figure. The more money the site generates, the more time I invest in it. So, if it were to generate $150,000 from advertising, I wouldn't shut it off, but I'd start pulling my time out of other projects, and moving it into this community site to add more of the requested features.
2. I want to save for a rainy day. Online communities don't last forever. It would be short sighted to shut off advertising simply because this years expenses are met, and then two years from now I need to close up the site because advertising is falling short. When the site hits a rough patch, I want the savings to either push it through or pivot. Coasting on maintenance costs would be a dangerous road with an abrupt end.
I've heard that line from people raking in several hundred thousand a year, while they still callously heap ads on their audiences.
If you have no target, neither for your site nor for your personal ambition, it seems like the veneer of "I tried to avoid them but couldn't" is really quite thin.
Do you serve the ads yourself or do you defer to third party ad networks? I have no problem with the former, but with the latter I think it's very hard to control what gets displayed, and you're also opening your users up to various attack vectors.
There has got to be a niche available for somebody to do plain old non-evil advertising???
EDIT $15,000 a year sounds like a tremendous amount of money to run a web site in 2019 ...
He said user content so that might be users uploading images, audio, or video with the associated storage and bandwidth costs not to mention workers for generating thumbnails.
I'm the grand-parent poster and not the parent, but yeah, my user-content sites don't cost anywhere near that much. Storage is probably the biggest cost, and that still doesn't cost much. I'm not really sure how a site like that could cost that much unless you're getting absurd amounts of traffic, or are using some poorly optimized software; though I also don't know the nature of the site or the content.
If my costs were anywhere close to that I think I'd have no choice but to suck it up and place some ads as well. As it is, community donations cover our costs just fine, but pretty much 100% of that revenue - which is all of our revenue - goes to infrastructure cost. We don't make any profit, but that was never the intention when creating the sites.
I can give you my feelings towards this topic.
Personally, I don't mind ads that inform me of the existence of a product that I may be interested in, where it tells me how it can solve my problems.
What I don't like is ads that use psychological devices to try to get me to buy their product. I also don't like ads that are a distraction of the content I'm trying to consume. So when playing a game, if the ad scroll at the bottom of the screen is flashy, I can't easily play that game so I give up. Now an ad that shows on a loading screen may be more acceptable, as long as the contents of the ad aren't something that would get me fired if someone at work sees it.
I also hate that ads have to have their own javascript in it. The ad networks should provide a safe canned set of functions that they control, and not serve up anything that an ad customer submits.
Finally, if I'm already doing research for something (such as browsing through the Bose headphones site), I don't want to see ads for those same headphones that I already researched, following me around on all the web pages I visit. It just really feels like someone is stalking me. Or look through a site like rvtrader, then when you look up the weather the next day you see a bunch of camper ads. Again, stalking. It's gotten to the point where I constantly browse in a private browsing tab (yes, there are ways they can still track me, but they aren't as obvious about it).
The distraction aspect is what really gets to me; cancelled my NYTimes subscription after these bright red / orange advertisements loaded all over the page, where the content I was interested in was the bland black text over white background. Couldn't even read the headlines without naturally focusing on the bright red advertisements.
I had this experience with my Irish Times subscription too ... it wasn't the main reason I unsubscribed but was a contributor ... actually IIRC it was what prompted me to install an ad blocker in the first place!
Personally it depends on the product. I find advertising specific prescription drugs abhorrent to anyone.
However, I think it’s completely reasonable to say talk to your doctor about ED or whatever. If there is only one treatment they seem similar, but when several options exist people should not be pushing for a specific drug based on an ad campaign.
- We've decided (in the US at least, but most everywhere short of a few communist or communist-adjacent countries) that the way we incentivize and reward drug researchers is by having them work for pharmaceutical companies that profit on the free market—and in particular that drugs are valuable to society and worth researching in proportion to how much profit they bring.
- If you don't know that a certain medical condition is a medical condition, you might not seek treatment for it, or you might not recognize it at all. In particular, rare diseases by their nature are those that many doctors don't know how to diagnose, and new treatments by their nature won't have been part of those doctors' curriculum.
- There are few means of reliably pushing information to the general public outside of advertising.
Therefore advertising "talk to your doctor about this condition" (and perhaps "whether certain drugs might be right for you") is both a rational / logical response within this framework and exactly what the framework wants you to do.
If we want to get rid of it, let's redesign the framework: reward drug researchers in some way other than profits, or find out how to inform either doctors or patients about new treatments in some other way.
Drug advertising on TV in the US is one of the more in your face dystopian aspects of visiting. It’s very strange to push specific treatments onto lay people who don’t have the background to clinically diagnose or choose treatments for themselves.
Maybe it’s a symptom of lacking a national healthcare system but we manage fine without drug advertising in the UK and elsewhere in Europe. In our case advertising and sales are aimed towards Doctors.
And even the pressure on medics has been greatly reduced by regulation.
My friend who is an independent prescribing nurse in the NHS [which means she can go off-piste like a regular doctor writing arbitrary prescriptions, she's not just limited to a handful of standard recipes to solve well understood problems] says after she qualified her blow-out birthday party was entirely paid for by drug reps out of their marketing budgets. These days that would get them fired, and the best you can hope for is stress toys, stationery, that sort of thing.
When visiting the USA I turned on the TV just to watch an ad segment (didn't have to wait long) and I agree with the dystopian feel. Medical ads and also the attack ads (political or otherwise). It just made me want to say "piss off ads! promote a product or service but stay the hell away from my personal business". Big vibe of none-of-your-business, but like you say they just get in your face. It feels a little like being at a tourist market.
But I wasn't there to watch TV so I filed it as the next weird cultural artifact where the USA is in fact exactly as advertised worldwide on TV and film instead of made-up by a crazy screenwriter :)
Norway also ban: Alcohol, smoke, gaming, all ads to children, all gun related, not allowed to count points in games before children are 13, credit card loans, all health related than can’t show scientific benefit..
Scandinavian translation difficulty: the word for a gambling game here is ‘spel’ or game (at least in Swedish), a video game is a ‘datorspel’ or computer game.
My typo - Should be gambling and all games involved money. The only one allowed is governmental and all the profit from that game go back to sports for kids, and “they” are closely monitoring that you don’t get gambling addicted to that game by forcing you to only play with a personal ID.
I think both of these types are not allowed where I live (the Netherlands) because, you know, people shouldn't be getting their medical advice from advertising, for what I hope are obvious reasons.
Not OP but I've had some thoughts on ads for a while that I've never shared:
1. Ads ruins user experience. This is pretty much an objective fact. People can and do adapt, but it's moving away from the ideal.
2. Ads often manipulates the user (emotionally, psychologically) to get clicks, which is just downright unethical.
3. Often unethical things are advertised, things that shouldn't even be on the market. These are usually rolled into an ad network, and ad embedders don't get a say in what's shown or not.
3. If we removed 99.99% (or maybe 100%) of all ads, I can't imagine that people will have a harder time purchasing what they need, when they need it.
Considering only points #1 and #4, there seems to be no harm in supporting ads in any way.
But #2 and #3 make it seem, to me at least, unethical to even work for a company whose business relies on ads.
I know a man who turned down a job opportunity discussion from Facebook this week for this exact reason, and I think that's noble, especially considering he's very poor and could use the raise.
Couldn't agree more on 2 and 3. What is even more unacceptable to me is that these ad networks track everything I do on the web. It is one thing that I see an ad for a laptop when I search for Chromebook (I'll call it contextual for ease) but totally different thing that I see ads for say Professional training when searching for Chromebook because I happened to click on a post on LinkedIn long ago. Other words, I don't like companies having a profile on me which they can use however the way they want at a later date.
Just as context, the vast majority of ad budgets are not tied to click through metrics. Ford & Coca Cola do not care a whit if you click on their ads.
The vast majority of advertising dollars are around a) brand recognition and b) spending to make sure that it’s the people they want to have brand recognition (for coke everyone, for Ford F-150 a particular demographic).
They believe this is important. They have years of evidence to prove it is & that you don’t think it works on you doesn’t matter to them.
Not a solution for everything, but focused websites/blogs (on guitar, camping, kayaking... Or even painting) can afford "ads" with no tracking (link to amazon products), or even invest some time to call specialized stores about single image ads without using any advertising network.
> Do you morally disagree with advertising/tracking monetization as a whole or just those particularly geared towards vulnerable populations?
Irrespective of one's views on this, it's a controversial topic. Given children are minors, this decision shouldn't be forced on them by app developers.
I used not to, but after having been in a few research programs exploring the future of add-tech, I now think we should treat advertising as we do environmental pollutants, and the collection and monetization of personal data as a harmful substance business in need of extremely strict regulation.
I don’t know, but the only kind of advertisement I consider morally sound is a properly indexed, well described parts catalog with good resolution photos.
>Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
That was exactly what happen to my kids yesterday. I don't mind ads, but when they are inappropriate for the 5 years old I get really pissed off. And I wish Apple Arcade could come sooner so they don't get distracted with Ads.
It is the same reason I don't really allow them to watch Youtube unattended anymore. I wish there is some curated Kid Channel I can safely let them browse. ( Kid these days are extremely good with technologies )
I let my kids try out YouTube kids and I thought all the content was total garbage. Mostly toy unboxing videos, video game walkthroughs, and creepy knockoffs of cartoons they liked. Deleted it very quickly. We stick to DVDs and Netflix now.
Yes Guided Access is great. I default it to a 20min timeout. So if I let my 8 year old play Minecraft on it, and he runs off to some corner of the house to binge, I don't have to worry about hunting him down. He'll get a nice warning around 3min out, and then the phone will essentially brick itself. It's great knowing that he will absolutely be coming back to me with the phone in 20min.
I am not familiar with the ad space, but isn't there a provider/method/framework that would allow people embedding ads on their apps/websites/platforms to select the types or categories of ads they'd be comfortable with?
I completely agree with your position. I have turned down solicitations from both organizations you listed for exactly the same reasons. Working for any entity that engages in any sort of behavior that involves compromising user experience or privacy simply for sake of profit is not something I can consider at this time. I understand situations arise that are not profit-motivated which can't be avoided (federal investigations, service outages), but it is clear in the case of Facebook and Google what is going on. Compromising user privacy and interactions is their principal means of doing business.
It could be that they interviewed with Google/Facebook and then afterward, but before accepting an offer, decided that they couldn’t abide by the moral situation.
We had several children’s apps on iOS back when ads were allowed. We chose to only have a single ad in the parent accessible settings screen and nowhere else. Showing ads to kids simply did not align with our philosophy.
That a choice about advertising, not about third party advertising. Even if you had decided to have ads, as long as they were first party adds, the policy would have allowed you to continue to deluge kids with ads.
> 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.
So far the only kids apps I've used with my little one is 'Sesame Street' and 'PBS Kids Video'. He loves Elmo, and its very handy in the pediatrician's waiting room to have a distraction.
I also run a PiHole, and to my displeasure, I've found both these apps use Google Analytics. PBS Kids Video goes a few steps further and uses Google AdWords as well as ScorecardResearch analytics. These publicly funded apps are siphoning data about me and my little one off to 3rd parties. The 3rd paries might not be able to use that data for targeted advertising within the app, but make no mistake that the data is still used to 'enrich' my shadow profiles. I am very excited about these changes from Apple and I hope that they are able to enforce them. I've written both of the apps support emails in the past about the analytics and never received a response.
I've also heard of a popular BBC kids app called CBeebies. Last time I ran it on my iPhone, it reached out to Facebook, Localytics, Branch.io, Google Analytics, app-measurement.com, and onesignal.com
ABC (the Australian equivalent of BBC) too. The web player sends data to gigya, newrelic and googlegadgetmanager. The news site adds (just the front page) adds jwpcdn, chartbeat and loggly. The live stream are from scribly or someone and often the content of them is embedded twitter, so our national government funded news service isn't even hosting much of their own content and it's unavailable to many that have sites like twitter blocked at world. The don't even have the profit motive excuse that commercial sites have.
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 companies fall in line with it. Or at very least more people begin to think about the trade-offs before blindly injecting google analytics into everything. Self-hosted analytics that does not feed into an advertising giant is not unobtainable goal.
Depending on the apps, you could make some age assumptions of the kid too. Even more, perhaps extrapolate the number of children in the household based on the age-ranges of the apps and the behavior of how they are using the apps. A 3 year old and and a 5 year old are going to have very different usage patterns. The number of children and their age ranges could be a very important metric when considering targeted advertising to the parents. The fact is, this information is used against the consumer to manipulate them into doing things they wouldn't otherwise do - click an ad and perhaps make a purchase. Any bit of information to further that goal will be used, even better if its information about the children since that's a major purchasing factor for parents.
In fact, so many apps embed these analytics frameworks, that it's possible to make an almost complete picture of what a device was used for every day, including location information, etc on the back-end.
GA today is much more than just pageview analytics. With something like Google Tag Manager, you can have non-technical staff add in event tracking for stuff like form completion or file downloads, without needing to get developers involved. Reporting for stakeholders is also robust because of its integration with Google Data Studio, Google Sheets and other related tools.
Ultimately though, GA wins because these organizations outsource web development and digital marketing work to agencies or contractors, and they are the ones that make the tooling decisions. GA is a known quantity, so even if their contract isn't renewed, a new agency will be able to take over the account fairly frictionlessly.
And there are more contractors that are GA-focused than there are for Matomo, and that's important when you're tasked with shopping around for agencies.
For the record, all of my projects use self hosted analytics.
But you have to understand, the marketing team wants analytics. You can request to allocate engineers to setup a server with motamo, which will require replication, setup, maintaince, etc.
Your project manager is going to say "Wait this is going to take X man hours, require maintenance, etc? Why don't we just use GA like everyone does, like we always have, as it's free, has builtin redundancy, requires no maintaince, and can be added in 5 minutes?"
They aren't going to even think about privacy. Most consumers don't even care (although they should).
To answer your question though: Instant setup, ease of use, zero-maintance, zero-cost, and it's an industry standard. Literally the only downside is less-flexibility (mostly only applicable to programmers/power users) and privacy issues, which again, not very many consumers or companies care about this form of privacy (but again they should be).
Have you considered a write-up of the issues with the CBeebies app? The BBC is the kind of organisation that might quite easily be shamed into removing those.
I think we are overloading what we mean by analytics and the purpose of it. Its not all about collecting profiles of users for advertising. It also about understanding the usage of your application. The BBC should absolutely by tracking the usage of their apps to ensure what the are producing has value, the just shouldn't allow that data to be used for third parties and their ad business. Note that BBC UK apps, and worldwide operate under different schemes.
It's not the fact that they're trying to understand how people use the app, it's that they're using services like Facebook and thereby syphoning more personal data towards corporate entities that have a genuinely terrible track record when it comes to using and abusing people's data.
If I'm not mistaken, Google Analytics isn't used for tracking/targeting across apps and a browser or app beaming statistics won't have that page visit associated with their google account. You don't even need to tick "my app uses the advertisement tracking ID" during app store distribution if you just embed Google analytics.
Dropping adds seems good to me, but dropping analytics doesn't seem great from a game dev perspective. New features and game balance is often driven by analytics data. For example, if no one's using a certain feature in the game then maybe it needs more attention brought to it or maybe attention won't be focused on it for the next update.
I understand that there's a fine line between game analytics and farming PII but I think it's an important line. I'm sad to see Apple forcing you to use a first-party analytics solution. Smaller indie devs often won't have the time to set up their own data pipeline and depend on things like Unity Analytics or Flurry to help them do data analysis.
I guess I should start a service that provides small indie devs with "first party" analytics. I provide the software, it runs on a server dedicated to you, your data is separate from anyone else's. That's first-party, right? But I suppose I would have to charge 3x more for that than Amplitude does.
I agree, the part about analytics sounds like a bad news, given that there's no fine line... Also, I'm very curious how would they impose it? Suppose I still want to use my analytics provider as a SaaS, but will just relay traffic to it via my servers, and would only use that analytics for game tuning - how would Apple know about it?..
Another problem is that nowadays each app usually uses quite a few 3rd party libs/services, and each one of them may have analytics of one sort or another, even when the app doesn't explicitly use them for that, f.e. Crashlytics, Firebase, Logentries... With a strict approach there, I'd be worried about stability of kids apps, if devs would be forced to disable those services...
As you point out, the rule doesn't prevent ads or analytics. It just prohibits third party ads or analytics. Cynically, one might say that prohibits best-of-breed ads or analytics. ;-)
It's not hard to see how this might turn out to be a case of a policy that sounds good, but in practice is a disaster.
"Ads in your app that are served to children need to be appropriate and served from an ads network that has certified compliance with our families policies."
It would be interesting to know how Apple's automation works as the impression (may not be accurate) is their approval or denying is a bit more precise.
I have had hobby games I made when learning taken down several times for violating the TOS. Just resubmitting with an extra config box checked is enough to get back on.
I got hit by the for kids advertisement thing despite not advertising or tracking in any way because I had not set it up to either be explicitly for kids or not.
My anecdotal experience shows this policy is complete bullshit or not enforced at all. Last summer spent time using a Google Play game for kids ages 10+ - The ads we overtly sexual and completely inappropriate for kids under 18. I screenshotted and tweeted it at Google and ... crickets. The developer who made the game was Pixonic: https://pixonic.com
As a parent of 3 children and owner of multiple iPads and Android devices (including a kids edition Fire Tablet) this really strikes a chord with me. We buy the Toca Boca and Sago Mini games and the occasional game from other providers that strike the kids fancy.
But this is a huge development. Big enough that I'll be dropping the Android devices and switching my kids over to Apple ones completely. As it is I have lots of conversations with them regarding why some games they see will never be bought by us (like those awful Thomas and Friends ones that you have to buy then still have ads and IAP to put up with).
Thank you Apple. But also, shame on you industry for making this something that I need to specifically look out for.
What do those conversations sound like with Thomas age kids? If you’ve got tips, metaphors, known failure, anything at all on how to create a class level understanding that short circuits per instance debates I’m all ears.
LOL. I ended up going overboard on it and actually took them to a store for Teachers' materials and bought some exercise books on Media and Currency/Finances and we've ended up with a bunch of discussions about personal finances, the advertising world, and critical thinking. I'm trying to instil in them the ability to analyze what they see, understand what the motivations of others are and translate that to the messages they receive.
If all goes well they'll understand what ads are and how they manipulate us from a young age and be better able to deal with this crazy world as they grow older. Of course this is a long game - I don't know if I'm being successful yet but I'm hopeful.
Because I am weird and because most of our video consumption on the TV does not involve old school ad blocks, I started my daughter pretty early (late 3/ early 4) on the idea that ads are “trying to sell us things we don’t need” when we saw them on TV. Then it was ... fairly easy to extrapolate that to the idea we don’t buy apps/ games that are covered in ads. It’s not perfect, but it works pretty well and she seems to understand there is a whole class of apps we will not buy even if she doesn’t have a deep appreciation of Why. We shall see how long that works.
This has been something both requested and discussed online for a long time. Kids can't really decide what information to share and what not, and they are often bombarded by retargeting ads supported by analytics services. It still remains unclear how those apps will make money using 3rd party ads, but it is clear that kids apps won't be able to use 3rd party SaaS services (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Firebase, etc) and have to rely on same-domain-on-premises and/or open source product analytics services, eg Countly (shameless plug: I am co-founder of Countly, building an open source analytics platform particularly for privacy and security reasons).
Let's see how it goes. Apple sometimes comes up with a "quick" decision and then stands down after a few months as criticisms occur. I expect that corresponding wording will change until the section goes into effect.
That's great, except there is no way to create a "kids" account without another apple device.
My kids school won't participate in the program to create kids accounts for schools, and I don't own other apple devices. So on my rented ipad, the only option is to create a 13+ year old account (for my kindergartner). So now that she's in 2nd grade, apple thinks she's 16.
I've complained about this endlessly to the school, and talked to a couple lawyers. Apparently there is no legal issue because I have to create the accounts, so they are my accounts. I'm just letting my kid use them.
So... apple sucks, give us a web-ui for creating child accounts. I don't mind having a parent account, but you cannot have family accounts without an Ipad or some other apple device, and a single ipad is a single user device.
> I don't mind having a parent account, but you cannot have family accounts without an Ipad or some other apple device, and a single ipad is a single user device.
You can't just log in to the ipad with a parent account, create a child account, log out, then log back in with the child account?
You should be able to. I did this back-and-forth for over a year before it was easier to change account regions. I'd have a US account and a Canadian account, and would switch between the two to get content from the other side of the border.
You can even sign in to one account for iCloud, and another for the App Store, if you wanted to. The only thing that didn't work were automatic updates; they'd only get downloaded for the iCloud account.
I've never tried to run MacOS on a virtual machine. I'm assuming you can't get a license for that, so it wouldn't be an "official" solution, but do you have a link?
The link has a guide on how to configure virtualbox to run macOS.
They also have some links to the macOS installer, but there are also plenty of torrents around with disk images of macOS.
> Apps in the Kids Category may not include third-party advertising or analytics.
Totally agreed for advertising... but analytics are essential to improving the quality and usability of apps including for kids, and they're a real cost to roll your own. Using third-party analytics is like using a third-party JPEG or MP3 decoder: it almost never makes sense spending 100's or 1,000's of hours writing your own.
So I don't get it. What's the harm for kids in third-party analytics? Third-party analytics are just a service, they're not necessarily ever correlated with anything else. But even if they are, the only argument I can imagine is not helping further build up advertising profiles... but if kids aren't seeing the ads anyways then again, what's the harm?
How hard is it really to add your own analytics? Isn’t it just logging what your users are doing and sync it to your server when you get a signal? I was writing stuff like this for enterprise field service Windows CE devices over a decade ago.
Waiting for a connection and syncing reliably and testing that it works is a little harder -- annoying but not too bad.
Provisioning a database to store the data, maintain backups, index properly for queries etc., and maintain so it doesn't run out of space or degrade in performance as datasets grow by many orders of magnitude is an entirely separate skillset and harder still.
Visualizing it -- coming up with complex SQL queries and then dumping them into a graphing tool and overlapping different data series on the same graph -- will take forever. A big part of analytics is exploring and looking for patterns. The person with the business background doing the exploring probably isn't a programmer or a SQL expert. So a pre-built GUI for this is huge, and will be the hardest thing of all to program.
So, pretty hard.
Or... you can throw in a third-party tool with all of that, and have it all work in an hour or two.
But the last two steps can happen on your side. The data can go to a data store someone else maintains like AWS and you can use any number of packaged visualization tools on top of it.
Analytics can be harmful too. Developers use it to make the app/game stickier, more attractive to children. Children also have no way of consenting or even knowing what analytics are. Not only that but there’s no knowing what happens to the analytics at third parties - regardless of their privacy policies. Basically all third party analytics are designed to build profiles and help marketing.
Plenty of safe ways to track interactions that don’t rely on third party scripts which gobble up all kinds of data. Plus might even be illegal depending on jurisdiction.
Addictive does not always mean fun. Kids love bright things like lasers and love to shine them into their eyes (I know I did), doesn't mean it's a good idea - even if it is fun.
Many third party analytics tools can be configured to track user behavior anonymously without any PII data. It is a feature because at least some developers want a solution to protect users privacy while still being able to gather data to improve user experience.
This feels like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are reasonable steps that can be taken to stop advertising trackers without a blanket ban on everything.
Here me out here- I equate apps with ads as predatory. The gut feeling from many apps/games is that the goal is to annoy you into paying. Many “free” games let you have one ‘turn’ and then force a 30-60 second ad on you that usually redirects you to the App Store to download some other affiliate app. Maybe I am the old man screaming get off my lawn, but when pc shareware was the rage you usually attempted to delight the user into parting with their money. Then I remember a shift in the late 90s where ad/malware started showing up in shareware. That effectively killed the shareware market for me. Rubberduck h30 was the app I remember as the culprit.
How does this impact Google's "YouTube Kids" app. It is currently listed as the "Best video app for all kids" on iTunes. It contains more videos advertising stuff to kids than it does any other kind.
With McDonalds non-affilitated but clearly still ads being the most prominent.
Well given that Google own the AdSense/DoubleClick platform which is used for serving ads on YouTube as well as all of it's own custom analytic tools none of these would be third party. The part about not linking out of the app would still apply though.
Wow, so that really reinforce the trend toward monopoly and conglomeration in tech. Make a kids entertainment platform and you must get acquired by google, facebook, Amazon or Apple before you can turn on ads.
1. Six months from now, Apple will announce a new ad network, which will be whitelisted for Kids apps.
2. Twelve months from now, they'll ban all non-Apple ad networks in kids apps. If they want to be subtle about it, I'm sure they'll find some inappropriate ad to use as a pretext.
3. 18 months from now, they'll open their ad network to all apps.
4. 24 months from now, they'll ban non-Apple ad networks in all apps, and swim in money as they've found another way to squeeze more money out of their captive userbase.
And every step of the way, HN will cheer as Apple continues to brutally exploit their ownership of the platform.
Sure thing I will cheer. I'm tired to death by quality and content of the ads in apps right now. I'm tired to death that apps have size of an elephant because of bunch of unrelated advertising and tracking frameworks compiled in. I'm tired that apps require permissions they don't need and then send data who knows where. And no, I don't give accesses, but bunch of people who has my contact information and less tech savvy or less privacy conscious send it around, left right and center.
So yeah, I will cheer. You can't fix your shit? Ok then, Apple will do this, this time on their terms.
That’s a good way to give the antitrust investigators even more evidence of wrongdoing. And I’m sure the ad companies will be more than happy to flood the DOJ and FTC with complaints.
And that is why Apple devices are more secure, faster, more privacy-respecting, and last much longer with good performance. That trade-off is absolutely worth it to me.
Where do you see a monopoly? The fact that people choose it doesn’t make it a monopoly. Specially with that price tag. You can choose many other options. There is no real economic argument to call it a monopoly.
Market share is different from monopoly. Apple is not the only phone manufacturer. There are many companies out there making phones. The fact that everybody likes or chooses them doesn’t mean they are a monopoly.
There is no problem about jsnell posting that. I just want to know what all the complaints about Apple (Amazon, Google, etc) is about. Why would it be wrong for Apple to do everything jsnell predicts?
It's not okay for Apple. It's a bait and switch tactic which Google uses that Apple is doing now. They created their App ecosystem on the basis of Ad's. Now they're strong arming developers to doing things their way.
It should not be okay, and must be protested. I hope that the government and Anti-trust lawsuits force apple to unbundle the Appstore. Apple has made enough money to recoup their investment starting from the first iPhone, and made incredible profit over that too.
Now laws should be made to ban appstores bundled with an operating system, and hardware.
Everyone should be allowed to install the app store they want with a flick of a button.
How do you define enough money? The fact that you don’t like it doesn’t mean you can get the government involved. Protest all you want, but that doesn’t give you the right to call for help from the government to enforce something because you consider they had “enough” success. Go build your own company, compete. If it is that bad developers would go somewhere else.
This should be the standard across the board, but unfortunately we're too far from that. As a parent, it pisses me off to see not-age-appropriate advertisement shown to kids.
Yeah, part of me wonders if this is just more a reaction to the apps market hitting the next plateau and one of the last impulse growth markets being kids apps. Once there is a special category it should create a new breed of app that would inherently get less complaints/refunds/etc.
I develop for both iOS and Android and since last year, I have completely stopped using ads in all my newer apps. I have switched to a freemium model. On my recent HACK app for HN client for example, I let you use all features and unlock features on a session basis. So lets say you switch on dark mode, I let you use it for the session until the app is either killed by iOS or restarted from the app switcher. Once restarted, you need to re-set the dark theme and I just show you a popup asking you to support development with a one time only small IAP. This freemium model has been working good.
On another of my apps, OLEDify I have used a tipping/donation model where I give all features for free complete and hope that you will tip me whatever money you like. This hasn't really gotten me much despite thousands of downloads and DAU but I just don't want to support the advertisement companies based on all the recent manipulative tactics they have been playing.
> 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.
This seems more like an opt in choice for developers of the app as opposed to forcing apps to the kids section (which as you stated would be impossible to manage)
The screen time feature lets parents control kids iPhones/iPads through content ratings, I am sure it would be relatively easy to extend it to kids feature. Also kids Apple ID would have the age info.
I think so. Among other reasons, those ads were deliberately included in the app by the people who created it (and now have explicit responsibility over the content of those ads).
Since parents trusted those creators enough to give the app to their children, that's something.
And their ban hammer is not terribly sophisticated either. They find one ad that is the same, or similar to, an ad being served someplace else and WHAM!
Unless you've got money to burn, don't try to be nickel slick with Apple. Learned that the hard way.
I would be much more impressed if it said “Apps intended for kids may not include advertising or analytics”
As it stands now it seems rather empty and in relation to recent news something that could fuel the anti-trust talks.
Edit: considering that the law of my country states specifically that you can not target kids with ads, I wonder how apple will handle it since they now obviously have a method of tagging apps targeted at kids.
Yes! This is amazing. The thing I most loathe is the advertising that shows up when my kid is using one of the few apps we allow (and PAID for), in the limited allotted time with the iPad.
Total feeling of powerlessness, especially when the content is not exactly child-friendly: last one she told me about was an ad for a game with somebody tied up, having his head cut-off, inside Cut The Rope.
Good; I only wish this is where applications on phones had started to begin with. Try giving a toddler a phone and they'll figure out navigation controls on their own easily, but once ads start playing they'll smash it because they have no clue what to do. Ads have no place in apps for kids
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.
If parents are willing to spend money on consoles for their kids to play and for school supplies for their kids to learn, this isn’t any different, right?
As a parent I've been cutting our family over to iPhones before this policy because the Android app world have become so fucking toxic. I'm delighted to be able to pay for things up-front as a business model.
Can someone please clarify the “analytics” part? All kinds of analytics services, or services that use your app analytics for their own purposes, or use it for the sake of ads targeting/retargeting, or have PII risks?
I’m not sure I see the harm to kids if an app uses some ads-free analytics provider like Amplitude just for its own 1st party needs... or am I missing something?
Yes, maybe they can't place an ad on your app but they do track all your user event data which means that they can target them somewhere else. All the iOS unique identifier, location, and user attribution data are collected directly into their servers.
Well, you can always use open-source solutions in order to collect your customer event data into your data-warehouse and run your queries on your own data.
Is this a new change? What is the backstory on this?
And how is "third party" defined? Sounds easy to game by having it only directly communicate with the server of the app developer, and having it completely impossible for Apple to tell whether or not they are then communicating with a third party service.
An ad network is not going to trust your stream of requests, taking you on your word that your requests are coming from actual users and that the ads are getting shown back to actual users.
I worked for a very large company that's considered a leader in apps and games for kids. I don't think this is as good as it seems first glance.
COPPA compliance isn't new. There are some third party analytics tools that are COPPA compliant, and any responsible company is already taking COPPA seriously. What's new here is saying you can't farm responsibility for your data collection to COPPA-compliant third party SDKs. My guess is because there have been too many watchdogs raising concerns, and it's much easier to review apps for compliance if you blanket ban third party SDKs with this purpose.
That said, this isn't going to change the business need. You'll just seem more first party code hitting a first party wrapper to a third party service. It will also encourage more small companies to try rolling their own, which invites bad security practices and greater risk what the data that is collected. I'm not sure that really helps kids or parents overall.
(almost) no users want that in 2019, When the App Stores launched we raced to the bottom and the price point we came to was free.
Just read the responses in this thread yourself, 5 years ago it would have been full of people demanding this now there are just a handful of you and the rest have switched to demanding their free app deal is sweeter with less downsides, not that they would rather pay.
Working on an ad platform, this definitely makes sense.
As a company we moved away from user targeting to context targeting where app developers provide all the context. Our case is specific to transit but I think in general this invasive ad model needs to go away
This means that if you make an app for kids, and you were planing on using ad monetization, your only recourse is to get acquired by an Ad-Tech company (Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon included) so that you can run "first-party ads."
I'm being drawn into Apple by their stances on things like this and privacy. As much as I am bought into the Google eco-system, I'm questioning how long that'll be for.
There is no such thing. Children do not make purchasing decisions. Advertising to children is adversarial manipulation of the development of their preferences.
How about adding an additional, voluntary section with apps that are bound by the same standards and requirements, rather than segmented by audience or purpose?
Adults can't really make that decision for analytics though. Most iOS users that don't use facebook have no idea that facebook has all of their data including their location because third party apps are using facebook's analytics SDK, for example.
Disable free to play games targeted at children completely. Require every children's game to have an upfront price (I suppose the $0.99 minimum app charge at least).
This would be great news for the market - game developers would focus on building more rewarding gaming experiences, instead of just endless skinner boxes. It would also help sell Apple devices, since developers would not need to target the lowest-common-denominator for mass advertising appeal.
I wonder if you could list multiple copies of an MMO game client on an app store, with each client having a different price and providing different in-game aesthetic effects like "FooGame: Sparkly Hat Edition".
Could be an easy way to get around this limitation.
That already exists with the Basic, Advanced and Pro editions of some application software. Extending that paradigm to a game is just a matter of determining which expansion packs are preinstalled.
The 70c that they would get out of that sale would still be much greater than the current ARPU from ad and microtransaction supported games, and would go some way to encouraging gameplay shifts.
Apple could just increase the minimum charge to $4.99 (or its regional equivalents) if it really wanted to increase quality. A decrease in its exorbitant 30% commission would be suitable as well.
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..."
If you charge for listing and take 30% for sales, people are going to try some aggressive revenue techniques.
One of the biggest unsolved problems for users is how to get the security of a walled garden while still encouraging open development, the sort of little experiments that become free simple QoL apps or toy proof of concept programs that spawn a business.
It's a problem only for users of course, less so for the gardeners.
You mean they are going to charge enough money to account for the cost of distribution? That could even be a new business model -- charging people money and giving them stuff. Like software makers have done since the first personal computer or game console came out? You realize that retail stores were routinely charging 60%?
This has sat for a while. I don't really understand why the sudden dismissive sarcasm, but my best guess is I just didn't explain my point very well. You probably don't care at all, but for posterity maybe I ought to explain what I meant.
I feel like it's easier to find reputable free software on PCs than on app stores. I'm not saying all software should be free, or that free software is better than paid or ad-supported software, or that it's crazy to charge for hard work. Nothing radical.
It just seems like on other platforms there are a variety of models that all overlap. Less so on app stores.
My best hunch is that the dev fees have something to do with that.
I feel like you're saying this is purely a distribution cost, but all these platforms are using the same Internet. I also don't think Apple is setting these fees at pure cost. They have a captive set of users that developers can't get access to in other ways. Monopoly rents for access to that unique set of users wouldn't be that crazy.
Maybe I'm wrong though. If there's some other theory that explains this, I'd love to hear it. "It's expensive to move electrons" doesn't seem to explain why the ecosystems on different platforms are so different though.
I built a game and naively added ads to it as it seemed a good way to monetize. The game started to be really liked, and had 300k+ downloads overall. Many kids started playing it also.
Luckily I realized quickly that kids play on the devices of parents and so the ads they might see are at times super inappropriate!
Then I removed all ads, I'd rather make less money but have people play and have a good time. Its not always about money. At times I get contacted by players, how they love the game and how it has been part of their childhood etc. Some very moving messages, worth more then a few additional bucks from ads and I feel much better because players aren't exposed to random ads, pictures and messages.
The learning for me was that I will never work on anything that uses ads as source of income, this includes turning down jobs at Google and Facebook.