[basket_horse]

I disagree. I think it is an “accident” that stems from organizations rather than anything sinister.

Companies generally want good parental controls, but let’s face it, it’s not the cash cow or particularly interesting.

This leads to understaffed teams of b-list developers with high churn, hence the overly confusing and half-baked features.

[rafaelmn]

It's nearly impossible to block YouTube on a smart TV without third party apps, even worse on non-android ones. And the app is not uninstallable. I don't think this is b-tier devs, feels like intentionall neglect.

[paulryanrogers]

LG let's me put a PIN on apps like YouTube, so the kids can't watch it alone.

[rafaelmn]

Why does this have to be TV based and not baked into YouTube app ? Considering how addictive YouTube scrolling is, and how quickly algorithm captures kids it should be mandatory.

My PS5 has play time built in.

[galleywest200]

Your kids will figure out that PIN.

[ToucanLoucan]

Parental controls and accessibility both suffer from the fact that they are good features to add but fundamentally do not drive revenue. They only exist in the average as much as is required by regulation.

No business would build wheelchair ramps unless they were made to, that's why we make them. There's no reason to not do the same for parental controls.

[pavel_lishin]

I would easily believe that Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc., explicitly staff these teams with childless adults.

[baq]

Given how easy it is for my 13yo daughter to get around screen time restrictions on iOS in ways I wouldn't believe are possible I'm not sure these people are even adults.

[hn92726819]

How does she get around the restrictions? I'm not aware of a way to do that on iPhone

[dan12ha]

Change the region. Not time and date, that can be blocked by screentime. Change the region. Sometimes takes multiple attempts but it does work. I had to pay a bug bounty to my child to get them to tell me how they did it

[baq]

uninstall app when limit runs out, reinstall used to work.

[selectively]

Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

Think about it that way: why would they make things harder for who they were in the very recent past.

[lovich]

> Apple has an engineering base that includes people who were recently children.

What?

I didn’t realize Apple with in the habit of hiring people straight out of high school instead of after going through enough university education that ends up with candidates in their early to mid 20s

[selectively]

Yep. They hire talent. University grads will work alongside red team folks that are maybe 22 years old and have been at Apple for two years. It's a thing.

I personally know more than one person who has a background along those lines.

[lovich]

I was more pointing out that 22+ year olds aren’t people who were “recently children” unless we’re continuing the trend of infantilizing adults farther into their 20s.

I was also under the impression that the faangs hired a larger % of post docs into their first industry job than most companies, so you’re also getting 27+ year olds as entry level engineers and scientists

[naravara]

Workaholic office cultures tend to filter out adults with kids by default so it doesn’t need to be an explicit effort.

[fpauser]

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Nope, parental controls are fucked up since ages. And this is by design, and not because of some "b-list developers".

[hulitu]

> Companies generally want good parental controls

Yeah, like Microsoft requesting that Firefox shall be (parentally) reviewed, while Edge happilly could connect to internet. Fixed by creating a local account.

[Jesus_piece]

It is sinister that this is overlooked by corporations by “accident”. What you are describing exactly what is sinister, that children’s safety controls and parents ability to decrease the risk comes last.

> If more people stopped to think deeper about this they would and should be very disturbed by what this means.

[texuf]

I've seen this first hand and yes, it's not sinister, getting dozens of services coordinated and permissioned under a single, easy to use, system is too much cognitive load for the team that inevitably gets tasked to do these things. Think about Privileged Access Management or Active Directory, but an 8 year old has to get it to work with a stay at home mom's 5 year old android device, and the PM's working on it can't think through second order effects (or even first order effects sometimes). And of course anything that negatively affects metrics will get rolled back (that part might be sinister).

[johnecheck]

We're not sinister, we just have these metrics that we prioritize at all costs, up to and including child well-being!

[iamnothere]

Maybe companies could set up comprehensive granular APIs for managing device/store permissions and outsource the parental control software that actually manages the settings. This way a vendor is getting paid to make those settings comprehensible and effective, so they have an incentive to do it well. This would also allow conservative/overly cautious parents to buy different software than more permissive parents. So everyone gets the permission model they want.