[hcknwscommenter]

Very strange article. The author is very upset that an "intimacy tracker" might receive an 18+ rating on the app store. I mean yes, younger folks do it, but the vast majority of potential customers are 18+. Why is this an problem?

[valzevul]

Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:

> The rating itself is fine: the target audience is well past that age anyway. What baffles me is the logic.

I don't mind the 18+ label, even though it's up to the users what they use the app for, whether it's tracking sex, a partner's health, or personal wellbeing.

But I do find the history of age ratings and categories in the App Store and the limits they have to be quite hilarious, and figured I might as well write them down.

[mslt]

Hi OP! I’ll share what I mentioned below in hopes of a response from you directly, because I’m genuinely curious to hear what you think:

Seems like people should be of whatever age we consider mature before they start capturing intimate data about themselves on random platforms. If we don’t think you’re able to understand the risks of pursuing your reproductive impulses, do we think you can measure the risks of sharing data about those impulses on a platform you don’t control?

Local data or not, if I were the steward of a marketplace I’d use that position to create this kind of teaching moment for pre-developed consumers. If young people had been warned since the mid 2000s of how much of their intimacy they were handing over to Meta, ByteDance, etc. before they started, the world would certainly be better off.

[valzevul]

Hey! I don’t disagree that people of any age should think twice before putting personal data (intimate or not) into any platform.

My point wasn’t about lowering the age rating. The issue is that Apple doesn’t have a real category for this kind of wellbeing at all. The age gate itself is sensible, but what’s funny is why it exists. It’s not "because we carefully considered how to protect teens’ data", it’s "because in 2009 the Store was drowning in farting apps, and we’ve been patching around that ever since."

[hapless]

So, what is your own company's approach to restricting underage use?

because your blog post is, ahem rather less than persuasive

[ffsm8]

Urm, did you read a different article then the one linked?

Because there's isn't really an argument innit - at least none that I took notice of. Isn't it just exploring the reasons why it is like it is today? They even made it abundantly clear in the beginning (and in the comments here) that the rating is fine for the app

And for what conceivable reason would this need to have sure underage people aren't using it?

A period tracker has relevance in the context of a sexual relationship, but there is really nothing about it that needs to be censored from underage people. It is not explicit content. It's a specialized journal, that's it

[nine_k]

I bet that the ratings are dictated not by usability but by liability.

Yes, people younger than 18 engage in sex, but this has different legal consequences than for people past 18, and Apple has no interest to wade through that legal quagmire.

[jrflowers]

> Hi, OP here. Not sure what else to add beyond the first paragraph of the article:

I would imagine that the confusion arose because they read past that sentence. You wrote that you don’t mind that the app you specifically made for adults to use got the rating that it did and then sort of talk about how you don’t find the rating system to be rational.

I couldn’t tell if the subject of this article is “I think my intimacy tracking app shouldn’t have an adult rating because a user could use it for general wellbeing” or “I don’t like Fortnite”

[valzevul]

That’s fair feedback, thank you. The point I was trying to make wasn’t "my app deserves a lower rating", it was "I built something for adults and realised there isn’t actually a correct category for it at all."

Once I noticed that gap, I went digging into the history to understand why the App Store age ratings and categories are the way they are, hence this archeological detour of a post.