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Comment by ryanjshaw | Hacker News Reader

Google Play Store showed my child an ad of a bloody body on a bed for a murder mystery game. The game was rated 18+ and the account had my daughter’s correct single digit age.

I reported the ad and a week later it was still there. I switched to Apple.

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Listen, we need you to verify your identity in order for us to not serve these ads to your kids. It's very important that you do this.

Apple is equally pointless.

They don't remove apps like Facebook or Twitter for displaying CSAM, but apparently ganked Telegram at the first single report of an extortionist trying to remove a public Telegram group because they posted CSAM in it.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/telegram-sa...

It's only okay when the American companies get away with CSAM.

The play store is pretty bad. About half the time I search for an app, BY NAME, without any way to confuse it with another app, the top result is a scam or copy cat, or adware. And always, without fail, they are paid-for ads instead of real search results. How can it still be somehow advantageous to trick your users into installing an app they clearly don't want. I wish there was a real alternative to the play store.

F Droid comes close and can even auto update now (never understood why that didn't work on the past), but most apps I want or need like banking, health insurance etc aren't on F Droid.

> never understood why that didn't work on the past

AIUI, Android simply didn't support it. The original way for apps to install other apps was via ACTION_INSTALL_PACKAGE, which is a user-visible action. The InstallPackage API did not support silent updates until sdk version 31: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/content/pm/P...

Unfortunately, I’ve seen MA ads for kids games on iPhone as well. Possibly not as bad but not great. It seems to be better than it was two years ago.

How did that work out for you? Safer? What was the experience switching, for you and for your kid?

Haven’t seen any bloody bodies advertised to my child… yet.

> I switched to Apple.

Sadly, the dirty money is luring them in too.

Yet you can’t run Linux on a Chromebook with a minor child user.

What do you mean? You can use Linux on a Chromebook just fine if the user is an adult but if the user is a child there is some Chromebook restriction?

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