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Comment by ajg1977 | Hacker News Reader

ajg1977

As much as it sucks, I do see the reasoning behind giving apps with internet-content an adult rating.

While it's true that Safari, Youtube, and even Mail can be used to access unsavory material the difference is these apps can be restricted by parents, individual third-party apps cannot.

Aside from having parents block all third-party apps, which neither Apple nor developers want, the only option is to have a "your kid could potentially access adult content" rating.

Everything else in this article is fair comment though. If Microsoft/RIM/Palm get their act together I can easily see many developers defect.

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We have an app that has been in the store for a few months. The app finds hiking and outdoor adventures near you, including displaying the wikipedia pages for parks. We've had to designate our app 17+, even though the only way to get to objectionable content is to load the wikipedia page for a park, and follow wikipedia links until you find something dirty.

If that was the label that went on the 17+ apps that are 17+ for third party content that would be fine - like for apps that would get a rating like 4+ otherwise. But it's not. Check out http://itunes.com/app/downloader for an example. The 17+ label for apps with mature content in the app and the 17+ apps rated as such for possible access to mature content are not even the same - at least the former is labeled only for the kind of content that is in the app, not the whole free-for-all.

...not to say that the 17+ rating should serve as the rating for "there might be adult-themed third party content", but that maybe apple should have one rating for the app itself and then a warning for the third party content...and a whole section in parental controls to enable/disable these particular apps with these warnings instead.

Alternatively, I wonder if Apple could put a hook into the iPhone's browser api such that any use of a browser in third-party apps can be restricted from parental controls.

Unfortunately the browser isn't the only place to access user-generated content. Take for example a Twitter client, just by nature of being a Twitter client and theoretically having access to the public timeline with mature content is enough to get a 17+ rating. Or...name any app that would need a browser built-in, presumably because the user would come across many links while using the app (and of course the dev wants to provide a better user experience via not having to quit the application)...where would the links come from? It wouldn't be just the browser that needs restricted.

"Aside from having parents block all third-party apps, which neither Apple nor developers want, the only option is to have a "your kid could potentially access adult content" rating."

They could parent protect the data connection. I think this would work fine for younger kids who don't need to be on twitter or whatever, and for whom parental protection is the most important (presumably).

With the arrival of the 3GS, a 1st generation iPhone just trickled down to my 2 year old. I just put it on airplane mode, but I am guessing that trick is only going to work for a couple of years.

Why would you give an iPhone to your 2 year old?

She watches videos, "reads" books (scanned images of picture books), plays games, listens to music and practices "typing". It's now a spare, so it doesn't have a calling plan. So just like a video iPod really.

I can tell you that multi-touch has been a lot easier to teach than mouse use.

Have had the same experience with multi touch interfaces and my kids: they instantly get it. They drag things around, stretch, move etc... all without being told.

Will be interesting to see what the future holds - perhaps the idea of a separate mouse to a screen will be seen as quaint one day.

The funny thing is the mouse should be a a very basic instrument - its basically point and grunt. But the dexterity required for kids is a bit of a step - touch seems to make it even more intuitive.

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