When will apps learn many of us are having children?

Apps are not designed for parents.

Are parents and kids considered when you design your apps?

Recommendations are something I do appreciate a lot personally. I think that, aside sharing all my personal preferences, interests or actually, entire life, they bring a lot of good things.

I am probably a hardcore user of auto-generated recommendations, from google app (news), to Spotify, passing by all other ads I am confronted to on websites (Google Ads to not name them all). All my personal information is being shared (I am totally AWARE of that) and I do recognize that I should not be giving them my life for free. Some time ago, I tried to cut the cord with all this, but then realized I was actually enjoying all the goodness coming with it, and that this was not that easy to accomplish either.

This is a big problem for parents

As an end result, my life is being shared with big business. In fact, not only my individual life is being shared, but also who ever else uses my phone (you see it coming right?)… like my children. I see this as a major issue for their privacy as they are unaware of what’s going on in the back, ‘cause everything just appears like magic right? We could have a much longer discussion surrounding that particular topic, but the reason I wrote this article is to explain why this is a big problem for parents. We are receiving the wrong and annoying recommendations because of the way they are designed or should I say the way they aren’t designed.

⏪ My day-to-day

Let’s just rewind a bit here and explain how I am using the apps that tracks every single movement I do. When I open up my phone in the morning as I wake up, or when I go to washrooms (don’t judge me, I know you do poopy-stops too! 💩 📱), or just whenever I have a just a few seconds to spend, I read online. I go on Medium (yay!), Google App’s news feed, LinkedIn, Instagram (lesser lately), Twitter (new recently), and some other gaming/tech websites such as Polygon, The Verge, etc.

Example of the feeds I use really often

All of these nice places I gather interesting information from are actually not providing it for free. No they ain’t charging me (well except Medium) to use their services, but they charge me on my privacy. As I said previously, I am okay with it at a certain extent, so I just go and enjoy content. Now, what I enjoy the most is to let them find content I love for me. I don’t have a single finger to lift (well, excluding the one that taps on the screen) and I can read all I am interested about.

I would say that most of the content I am being recommended with is “good” for me in some ways. I love to discover new things, so I do not dislike having some content that is not directly related to my searches, history, etc.

Where the problem lays

There is one only problem with this for me right now, and it is related, not to what I am doing on my phone, but rather to what my kids are doing when using it. Their “field of expertise” is usually limited to Games (Google Play), Videos (YouTube) and Music (Spotify). So what happens when these little people start playing around with my phone you think? YES! They screw up all my recos! To illustrate it, let me show you what is the result I got. (By the way, feel free to spot and respond to me of what are the errors in my recos below)

If you can’t spot the errors, well then you might think I am actually very weird

Have big businesses like Google and Spotify forget to empathize with parents? 😟

How does a father like me feel when his preferred apps recommends him childish stuff? 😤

• I feel like I need to sacrifice the last things that should be only mine and for me only.
• I don’t even have a personal life anymore
• I get frustrated by the irrelevancy of the recommendations
• I feel like the app is no good for me (badly designed in my case)
• I am reluctant to let my kids play with my phone, even though I know I would make them happy
• I am ready to buy another device to them, which will impact my wallet, but most importantly give away the control I have on my kids to play with a device and what they do with it

The Outcome

As a result, we use these apps less often or just completely stop using them. Yes, because actually we won’t stop giving our phones to them. How can anyone resist them?

Credit: Shrek Movie from Dreamworks (an awesome one btw)

You are now asking yourself — “Well are there any well-designed apps out there?” The answer is YES! Netflix and Disney+ (to name the most important ones to me) got it right.

The Solution

How did Netflix & Disney+ got it right?

Easy enough. They simply decided to use something created a long time ago which is called “user profiles”. For those of you who have no idea of what this is or how they help make some order in a parent’s life, here’s my take on its definition:

[n] User Profile

A system that helps parents, aka people having kids using their smart devices, to customize as well as seperate specific environments being used by themselves and another party (again for those not following, KIDS) which is associated with each party’s personal data and, most importantly, their god damn interests.

*you can also use Wikipedia’s, but I thought mine was better, haha 😆.

Spotify’s family plan is no good by the way (in case you were thinking about it), as they do not consider that the youngests will not be able to logout/in to their profile when they want to listen music. It needs to be in the parent’s main profile, as one of the users.

Power to parents ✊ 😂

The solution is quite simple, leave it to the parent. Ensure they have a “kids” mode easily accessible within each app. There are some kids mode apps on play store (I do use them), but they are only preventing kids to use specific apps, not going into “incognito” or have their own personal data trackers and cookies. As parents, we need to be able to control each of these apps and decide if whether we are okay to let our kids privacy being shared thus our recos to changed based on these future IOT ambassadors. In fact, at 3, my daughter would know she need to tap on the cartoon face of an app (referencing to Netflix/Disney+) to find her recos, what is interesting to her (cause adult stuff is boring and scary… clearly).

Netflix and Disney+ profiles for my family (no I am not the actor playing Lucifer…)

So if she has her own set of trackers and recommendations, it is even better (I say that only knowing that the app would not know who they are, only that they are in my family. I would not accept to share their real name or any other info).

I can only hope that the others will finally get it right one day.