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None of that answers my question.

Why can't adults opt in to seeing adult apps?

There are literally hundreds of millions of non-iDevice smartphone users who don't live with these restrictions and who are not being harmed at all. Is there something special about iDevice users that means they need extra protection? Of course not.

The first point seems to cover it: Kids will just opt-in too.

Then ask for a password, credit card number, whatever.

I'm not sure how a password can validate a person's age and I had a credit card long before I was 18.

"I had a credit card long before I was 18"

And this is a different problem that also needs to solved.

Why? It was a great way to learn financial responsibility and start building a credit history. I have never gone a month without paying the balance off in full, so it seemed to serve me well.

People jumping into credit late in life as an adult without any teachings on how to properly manage their financials is the greater problem here.

Why? Because one needs to be 18 to legally sign a contract.

If you had a credit card before 18, that means you were added on your parents account as an authorized user and you were piggybacking off of their credit history.

The greater problem here is that credit cards exist in the first place.

> The greater problem here is that credit cards exist in the first place.

Perhaps in the recent age of debit cards, but credit cards filled a massive void in the usability of cash. And it is often still more convenient to manage your money transfers after the fact.

I just don't get the negativity. They're a great tool when used appropriately. You can't really fault the tool if people use it inappropriately.

How is it a problem that credit cards exist? Credit cards are incredibly useful for two reasons, IMHO.

1. It's like having a proxy between your actual accounts and your purchasing. A stolen credit card is annoying and easy to rectify. A stolen debit card is terrifying.

2. Sometimes in life, an expense arises that exceeds both income and savings. When this happens, we either pay with credit (of some kind), we don't meet our financial responsibilities, or we go without. Sometimes the best option is to go without. When that is not possible, the credit card is a good answer. Pay off your balance responsibly and as quickly as possible and either save more in the future or be prepared to pay interest again.

+1 for stolen debit card. Aside from fraud liability agreements, in the absence of them, it creates an upper bound on the damage that can be dealt.

Credit cards are a short-term loan which doesn't require approval for every stupid minutiae. Ever signed a loan? Takes a bit of setup. Imagine doing that while paying for fast food. Pain in the ass. Take it for what it was meant to be: a loan system. Saying "credit cards exist is a problem" is like saying the concept of loaning money is bad, which I will handily point you to for-profit startups and non-profits that all either make or use loans to bring about positive change.

Depends a lot on what you mean by credit card, stuff like Visa Electron is called a credit card by visa but it is actually a debit card that is impossible to overdraft.

The whole issue is a complete red herring anyway. Safari is accessible by default, and gives children access to a universe of objectionable content that the App Store could only dream of.

If "parents don't bother enabling parental controls" was an actual excuse, they couldn't ship a web browser!

Is it really Apples place to police that?

Probably not, but their views are their own to make.

I think it does, they are saying that even an adult-only opt-in is flawed because thats the same as the child restrictions, it's often not set up.

The last point is probably why a lot of parents buy iPhones for their children.

As for the app in question, I find nothing objectionable about it, im sure the same information is available through Safari, but i suppose the same argument applies to adults wanting to see this content, stop whining about not having an app to do it and just look it up online.

Opt-in is quite obviously not the same as opt-out (via restrictions) so it's dubious to compare the two. The parent poster was asking for a way to allow iOS users a way to voluntarily and explicitly enable content that may be deemed objectionable by some. It's not the same as restrictions, because the device is passively not going to allow those types of applications.

It is effectively the same. Unless the parent sets up parental controls (which they aren't going to do) there's nothing stopping the kid from opting in.

You're making unfounded conclusions about a hypothetical feature Apple hasn't implemented.

I can think of at least one way to make it difficult for a kid to opt-in (I'm sure there are others): require the opt-in to be done online and require re-authorizing the credit card associated with the iTunes account. If it's good enough to get an email account out of a COPPA jail, it's good enough here.

"Why can't adults opt in to seeing adult apps?"

Because Apple made the iPhone and they own the iOS store and they decided they could make more money with it this way.

"There are literally hundreds of millions of non-iDevice smartphone users who don't live with these restrictions and who are not being harmed at all. "

This is called assuming your conclusion. There are certainly standards at Google Play and Amazon's Android app store, not every Android user can sideload apps and the idea that no one has been harmed by uncurated stores is strictly false in general and in specific cases like this basically unknowable.

'Because Apple made the iPhone and they own the iOS store and they decided they could make more money with it this way.'

That's a statement of fact, but does not answer the question of why.

The mobile platform is looking more and more like the central computing platform of the next decade at least and it's way too important to allow one company's Romper Room sensibilities to determine what is and is not expressible in this new medium. I don't want to live in a digital Disneyworld.

"Protecting the children" is always the scoundrel's excuse for pushing censorship and control over the line of a sensible balance.

I think I missed something. I'm pretty sure I knew what death was before I hit puberty. Does this app include photos of the result of the strikes? Is there supposed to be a "talk" you have with your kids around age 12 or 13 where you explain what drones are and reveal for the first time that there is a war in Afghanistan and Pakistan?

Many places encourage the kids to pledge allegiance to the country carrying out those strikes. It seams like that talk should happen before they're taught the pledge.

If they have a parental control feature, recognize that it's not usually turned on, so set app store policy assuming parental control isn't on, but that style of protection is desirable ... why don't they just default parental control to "on"? Or at least make it a device-setup-time prompt?

Of the "iOS' walled garden is anticonsumer" concerns - the one that's in regular demonstration is Apple's refusal to allow adults to indicate that they really are grown up enough to be exposed to content regarding politics, religion, war and, yeah, even sex.

"...parental controls don't work unless the parents set them up (many don't)."

This is still the problem. You don't know whether the kid or the parent opened the box and set the phone up the first time.

If my kid someone ordered a cellphone without my knowledge and got it shipped to my house and opened it and set it up, I have a lot bigger problems than him finding sex or "wrong" political opinions on that phone.

While I know some people at HN would still be mad if the App Store defaulted to "kid safe," it's a fix with much smaller side-effects than outright bans. Assuming "to protect the kids" is really the motive.

Now suppose that clueless suburban soccer mom got her kid an iPhone and doesn't [want to] know anything about configuring this device. Box arrives, she hands it to the kid.

Yes, this parent has problems. And it's this situation that Apple thinks they're watching out for.

Then the kid stumbles across adult material on his new fancy phone, and is apparently scarred for life.

Oh wait, this already "happens". The phones come with webbrowsers.

So set it to "child-safe" mode by default, and require a credit card or other age-verification mechanism to unlock it.

I really don't understand what problem Apple is trying to solve.

Cynically, I'd say Apple is (successfully, judging by the commentary here) solving the problem of finding reasonable-sounding justifications of their app store approval process (and the inevitable arbitrary decisions that come with it).

They're trying to avoid the situation where they have to stand up to a morality-in-the-media-type group and defend someone else's freedom of expression.

Allowing the web is PR-defensible: "it's the web". But when it comes to things you explicitly review and choose to allow in your store, you're forced to either stand up for adults' right to that content, or you preemptively censor yourself and your suppliers. (a la Walmart)

BS argument through and through.

1st* You need an Apple ID with a credit card to use the App Store. Ergo, adult work. Ergo, parental controls can be integrated into the credit card screen by the simple checkbox "Is the user of this account an adult?"

2nd* Supreme Court Justice is given the authority by the state to decide on immense matters after years of honorable (which is their title, by the way) service. Nice attempt at equating that with an app review team, whose job, according to an Apple employee, is to look "at things that may or may not be dcks all day long."

3rd Blabla.

4th* More blabla with qualifiers to look like one of us.

> You need an Apple ID with a credit card to use the App Store. Ergo, adult work. Ergo, parental controls can be integrated into the credit card screen by the simple checkbox "Is the user of this account an adult?"

I'm pretty sure you don't, at least beyond the first-time setup of the account. My son has an iTunes account and we "fund" it through iTunes gift cards. There is no credit card attached at all. Once his gift card credit is used up, no more purchases for him.

Not to mention Visa gift cards.

Isn't safari only a few clicks away anyway.. after all the web is darker than any app store.

You don't need a credit card to open an iTunes account. Select None for payment type when creating the account after switching country and purchasing a free app. Then use gift cards from the target country, which can be purchased here and there. http://lancewiggs.com/2010/04/13/how-to-have-a-us-itunes-acc...

Wow, I thought you were joking and making it up. But it turns out these are actual store guidelines, and they are written in this style.

If parental control is truly the main issue, face detection algorithms that also assess your age could be a solution [1], but then again, it seems like Samsung is owning the patent for this [2]. Oops!

Sources: 1. http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2012/04/how-old-do-you-look-fa...

2. http://www.google.com/patents/US8218080

The review guidelines have a surprisingly human tone to them.

Properly written that way to make you feel connected to a human - and not some cold, no feeling facistic reviewer.

Yes, many (but not all) of Apple's developer documents do, especially developer release notes for new and/or experimental features.

They certainly do: simultaneously arrogant, condescending and vague.

I didn't say they were friendly. They just don't sound like typical legal boilerplate.

I don't know, I read it in the voice of GladOS.

How do those last two points have anything to do with his question?