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I'm an app developer who's spent my career building excellent iOS apps, previously with Google and Snap. I have every intention of raising my kids as far away
by joenot443 2y ago
I'm an app developer who's spent my career building excellent iOS apps, previously with Google and Snap.
I have every intention of raising my kids as far away from smartphones as possible, ideally until they're at least teenagers. My fiance and I have already discussed keeping the household as de-screened as possible, it's something we consider a lot.
It's interesting you'd suggest that an app developer would have a conflict of interest that other engineers might not. In my experience, engineers who work with mobile apps, especially ones in the social space, are way, _way_ more likely to understand and be wary about the dangers in overexposing kids to a life of feeds. Colloquially, we call this "seeing how the sausage gets made".
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoThat's exactly what I was going to say. Every software dev I know who works on apps, social media, etc. all keep their kids from going near the shit. They know, conflict of interest or not. I've not seen anyone behind these products once they hit a mature state where they start psychologically stripmining their audiences who's eager to get any of their family onboarded.
- joshuakcockrell 2y agoI worked on the Twitter iOS app. Can confirm my kid isn’t allowed a phone until they’re a teen. Once they get one, I’ll be spending hours figuring out how to MDM brick the thing so they can’t get anywhere near social media. Having said that, I’m still an app dev (personal finance & budgeting) and I’m excited to onboard my kid into that world.
- philsnow 2y agoApple Configurator.app You can set the phone to only run an approved list of apps (like Phone and Messages, and that’s it, no App Store)
- vladgur 2y agoCan you expand on it? Screentime control are absolutely lackluster
- throwaway888abc 2y agoHopefully with some future update. You are totally right - badly needed thing
- adolph 2y agoI have a notion that home mdm plus network controls is necessary (and using mdm to ensure vpn thru the latter). iOS controls have worked well enough so far but the school chromebooks have nada.
- tyre 2y agoIt’s sad that these people know this and still work on them. I can’t imagine living my life day-in, day-out knowingly making other people’s lives worse.
- Jensson 2y agoYou can work on a bad thing to try to make it less bad, you not being there would make peoples lives worse since the app would still exist but be even worse.
- largbae 2y agoThey aren't _people_, they are just Daily Active Users. (/s)
- adolph 2y agoName any industry and there’s probably some negative aspect to it. Everything sufficiently effective at anything has a high potential for misuse.
- canucker2016 2y agoI'd qualify that phrase as, "seeing how the factory sausage gets made". Social media at the start may have been neutral to slightly negative, but once creators started optimizing and the various "algorithms" were installed and A/B tested, what came out the end is some pretty nasty stuff mentally. Junk food for the soul.