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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

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".

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I'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.

That'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.

I 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.

Apple 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)

I 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.

Can you expand on it?

Screentime control are absolutely lackluster

Hopefully with some future update. You are totally right - badly needed thing

It’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.

You 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.

Name any industry and there’s probably some negative aspect to it. Everything sufficiently effective at anything has a high potential for misuse.

They aren't _people_, they are just Daily Active Users. (/s)

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