[asutekku]

Any kind of amusing content for kids is time restricted in china. If a western game company wants to get into the market, they need to implement time limits & age checks.

[lozenge]

Are they linked at all? Otherwise if you add up all the time limits they must exceed a day...

[jojo259]

Yes, they're linked by some form of government ID. Of course, it's probably very easy to get around that in some manner by just playing offline games or using a parent's ID.

[mcculley]

The question is asking about multiple apps coordinating.

Wouldn’t this require a central database and an API for querying/updating time spent in an app per ID? Where is that API?

[jojo259]

Yes that's what I meant, the apps coordinate by being linked to some government ID. At least that's what I've heard.

[mcculley]

I am quite skeptical of this. There would have to be an API. There would have to be documentation for that. There would likely be keys assigned to individual apps.

[thatguy0900]

Couldn't they just send the government 'ID #11111 has played our game for 30 minutes' and 'ID#11111 is requesting a login how much time do they have left' and let the gov track the specifics

[veqq]

They do this. Basically everything runs straight through wechat, as if the facebook appstore hadn't lost relevance. Wechat is the api in most cases. You can even go to court on it.

[lossolo]

This is a country that has "great firewall", social credit system for all citizens with centralized API etc. It's not a problem for them to create an API for this.