Yeah, as someone who makes customer facing software for large brands, this is because of compliance reasons with COPPA and other regulations. 13 isn’t an arbitrary number, it’s the age that children are considered old enough to opt-in to some digital services, by law.
Below this age, not only do you need parental consent (which quickly becomes a ux design problem) but also have to take extreme precautions with regard to personal information.
Apple already takes far greater precautions than their competitors with this kind of data, but at some point it gets to a place with kids where you can’t track things that are essential to make the service work, and may have to dumb down some of the features for everyone, or have two modes or logging tracks. And maintaining multiple versions means exponential complexity.
It’s not just a cost in engineering time, it would mean difficult tradeoffs in the product, most likely.
Accessibility has similar issues, but there are lots of people in software who really care passionately about accessibility, who’ve made it their career mission to do it right. On the other hand, many people in software would rather kids didn’t use devices so much.
Apple's current terms explicitly say a parent can provision an eligible transit card onto an under-13 child's Apple Watch, after which the child can initiate transit transactions themselves. The parent assumes financial/legal responsibility.
The parent does not need to accompany the child. Once provisioned, the watch can work at the fare gate independently; Express Mode doesn't even require the watch to have a network connection at the moment of use.
The obvious solution is for the bus to sit at the school for five minutes while each child spends ten to twenty seconds uncrinkling dollar bills. Or is that just how it works on my bus route?
SF made transit free for children, so Apple engineers probably don’t think about kids needing a transit pass on their watch. Amen to making transit a nice place for children to be on. And Amen to bus frequency. Hopefully, the collected fares can go towards that. My kiddo discovered it was faster to walk home (45 minutes) then wait for the bus that comes 20 minutes after school gets out.
The blind user support comment struck me as odd. There's a really good ROI-based argument for implementing accessibility: Regulations in some parts of the world mandate accessibility, and openly ignoring it invites the creation or enhancement of more such regulations.
Perhaps, but also, this is just fundamentally a good thing to do, and it's good to think that Apple wasn't so Molloch-ized in its management that it couldn't maintain some values other than "what maxes out next quarter's earnings?"
I agree, and it is both true and very nice that corporations do often go beyond the bare regulatory minimum... especially when they have a money printing machine. I spent 10 years at Google working on Android, and we also did a huge amount (around accessibility and many other things) that weren't required by regulations and users might not even have noticed.
I once had a meeting with the CTO of California (states have CTOs, who knew?) about the work I was doing on mobile driving license support in Android. He kept trying to pin down exactly how Google was planning to make money on it and it was very frustrating to me because we *weren't* planning on making any money on it. We were doing it partly because of competitive reasons (Apple was working on it) but mostly because it was a good thing to do... electronic identification credentials provide a lot more opportunity for privacy-preserving presentation than plastic cards that display all of your info or none, not to mention that someday maybe you'll be able to leave your wallet home.
Anyway, my point wasn't that I don't believe Apple might invest more in accessibility than is required, just that it was a strange answer. Why make such an angry-sounding response when he could just say "Accessibility is good, and required by regulations."? Perhaps if I heard the full context it would make more sense.
It’s easier to do things like sponsor fundamental research or provide unexpected benefits if your company shits out profits. By the same token, small business owners are sometimes the shittiest bosses.
I think small businesses often fail because they don't know how to optimize enough. Apple's business model of a walled garden with high-quality, somewhat overpriced hardware and software that "just works" is largely what lets them not get Mollochized--unlike most Android/Windows devices, they are mostly not in a commodity business competing with the cheapest factory anywhere on Earth.
There could be a big difference between accessibility features designed to technically comply with regulations and features designed to actually produce a good user experience.
We are lucky in London to have this solved with kids' oyster cards which give them free travel (and if they didn't have it for free then parents could top up!) is there no physical alternative in DC?
According to someone in an earlier comment, WMATA does have a card payment system. I think the idea is that the Apple Watch payment method is more convenient by being less likely to get lost/misplaced.
Can't help wondering if the primary reason why Apple doesn't do this is legal. After all, anything software related oriented around kids has much greater legal liability if something goes wrong, than if it is restricted to adults. Thus, any kids feature, the business ROI must be very compelling to justify the risk. In the case of addictive social media, the compelling ROI is there; in the case of transit passes on Apple Watches, it, unfortunately, isn't.
I think right now there is a lot of fair concern over how tech has made us anti social - especially kids. And tech that enabled youth freedom would very much be the opposite.
I also think your point on cities is something a lot of parents miss - your kids could walk to school, which is far superior to school drop-off set ups. Then they took the (city) bus, and presumably could independently go to extracurriculars. In a burb thats neither walkable or transity, kids have to be driven around until 16. Some of that is unavoidable with modern travel sports, but even if you reduce the drive to the weekend games rather than the more frequent practices, youre giving kids independence AND freeing parents up to work or whatever.
A big yard is nice. A public park is nice. A quiet street is nice. Being a mile or less from extracurricular and schools is nice. Owning a minivan is useful, but having transit nearby is too. These are often in tension with each other, but the narrative that "you can't raise kids in a city" has rung hollow to me...
If I'm reading this right, I might expect it to have a similar issue to WMATA's system; i.e. you (once you're 7 years old?) need to get and carry your special youth Orca card in order to take advantage of it?
Living in the suburbs, setting up an Uber app for your kids is also very nice. We didn't use that for routine travel, but we did / do use it for minor emergencies where someone is stuck at an event that ended early and no drivers are available for a couple hours to get them.
This is a great idea, but as I keep hearing over and over, Americans don't want to raise their children in cities! Cities are for childless hipsters and DINKs, and real Americans raise their children in suburbs, with big-ass houses and big lawns and big backyards and big SUVs parked in driveways in front of big garages filled with too much stuff to fit an SUV in there.
So, yeah. You know me, you know I'm a YIMBY and walkable urbanist at heart, and I dearly wish that more American cities were like Boston, but as things are right now, your proposal is relevant to a tiny minority of America's children. BTW, when I was in Poland in July, it was so great to see public transit being used by people of all ages and socioeconomic strata, including families with young children. My mom took public transit to high school when she was a teenager in Krakow. (In Poland we don't have separate middle and high schools; elementary school is grades 1-8, and then high school is the equivalent of grades 9-12, except you restart the numbering, so instead of "grade 9" you say "high school grade 1.")
I'm in-between. I like walking places (although in general I prefer a bike), but a yard is also super-high-value, in away nothing I know of replaces well. That is - you can send a 5-year-old to go play in the yard while helping the 10-year-old with homework, or putting the toddler down for a nap, or just because they have more energy than fits in one house. Parks and busses are great - but "a place where a 5-year-old can play outside without me" is also very helpful.
That doesn't have to be a big yard: a duplex on a 5000-sq-ft lot is big enough.
Neighborhood parks had this covered. This is literally what happened at every apartment complex I lived in. The little courtyard park nearby would be where kids congregate.
And if the park isn't safe or something, then I'm all for spending tax payer money to fix that.
Totally fair. Maybe I wouldn't have worried too heavily if they were with their 8yo sibling. And if there is a train of kids on the way there, I think that changes a bit.
That said, remembering 5yo specifically is carrying a lot of weight, there. The years go by so fast that it is hard to remember the specific flipover point from, "no way in heck are you making it that far" to "ok, sure be back in an hour or so."
That is, my gut is my memory of the kids at 5 is actually my memory of them at slightly older ages. :D
Making cities more kid-friendly seems worthwhile on multiple grounds. Ideally, you'd like young couples living in the city not to feel like, as soon as the preganancy test pops positive, they need to call a real estate agent. That requires attention to stuff like public order/safety and public schools as well as public transit, but all that stuff is doable.
1.) The majority of the folks building these products themselves don't send their kids on public transit. This is why Apple Maps/Weather were great and accurate in and around Cupertino and took a long time to get better elsewhere.
2.) With my kids (11 and 14) and their friends is this phone vs watch divide. I chose the former route and around half way through their first year of middle school I got the older one a used iPhone and took the extra step of removing access to the web and heavily restricted apps through Screen Time. I'd prefer a flip-phone, but none are available with Find My. Contact is limited to those in their Contacts, those are restricted to who we know personally, no other apps allowed and the phones are locked up during school hours. As far as Apple knows, the device is used by an adult there is no age restriction but from my son's point of view, the device is worthless except to contact us or find out why their friends aren't at the corner on their walk to school. Each year, as they prove their accountability and maturity, we allow additional apps. My oldest started high school, he got a newer phone and his older phone is now wiped and waiting to be activated for his younger brother.
I’ve done the same. Removed Safari and locked most things up via locked screen time restrictions. I gotta say that it is a cumbersome process on older phones and Apple could make that much easier.
Yeah, as someone who makes customer facing software for large brands, this is because of compliance reasons with COPPA and other regulations. 13 isn’t an arbitrary number, it’s the age that children are considered old enough to opt-in to some digital services, by law.
Below this age, not only do you need parental consent (which quickly becomes a ux design problem) but also have to take extreme precautions with regard to personal information.
Apple already takes far greater precautions than their competitors with this kind of data, but at some point it gets to a place with kids where you can’t track things that are essential to make the service work, and may have to dumb down some of the features for everyone, or have two modes or logging tracks. And maintaining multiple versions means exponential complexity.
It’s not just a cost in engineering time, it would mean difficult tradeoffs in the product, most likely.
Accessibility has similar issues, but there are lots of people in software who really care passionately about accessibility, who’ve made it their career mission to do it right. On the other hand, many people in software would rather kids didn’t use devices so much.
Interestingly, Tim Cook actually made that accessibility comment in response to an analyst question about Apple's spending on climate initiatives.
Ai says this is possible now:
Apple's current terms explicitly say a parent can provision an eligible transit card onto an under-13 child's Apple Watch, after which the child can initiate transit transactions themselves. The parent assumes financial/legal responsibility.
The parent does not need to accompany the child. Once provisioned, the watch can work at the fare gate independently; Express Mode doesn't even require the watch to have a network connection at the moment of use.
The obvious solution is for the bus to sit at the school for five minutes while each child spends ten to twenty seconds uncrinkling dollar bills. Or is that just how it works on my bus route?
Or 10 minutes while each kid needs to individually scan their id and traffic is held up for blocks... (Fairfax VA)
Do you not participate in the Kids Ride Free Program? (https://ddot.dc.gov/page/kids-ride-free-program)
SF made transit free for children, so Apple engineers probably don’t think about kids needing a transit pass on their watch. Amen to making transit a nice place for children to be on. And Amen to bus frequency. Hopefully, the collected fares can go towards that. My kiddo discovered it was faster to walk home (45 minutes) then wait for the bus that comes 20 minutes after school gets out.
The blind user support comment struck me as odd. There's a really good ROI-based argument for implementing accessibility: Regulations in some parts of the world mandate accessibility, and openly ignoring it invites the creation or enhancement of more such regulations.
Perhaps, but also, this is just fundamentally a good thing to do, and it's good to think that Apple wasn't so Molloch-ized in its management that it couldn't maintain some values other than "what maxes out next quarter's earnings?"
I agree, and it is both true and very nice that corporations do often go beyond the bare regulatory minimum... especially when they have a money printing machine. I spent 10 years at Google working on Android, and we also did a huge amount (around accessibility and many other things) that weren't required by regulations and users might not even have noticed.
I once had a meeting with the CTO of California (states have CTOs, who knew?) about the work I was doing on mobile driving license support in Android. He kept trying to pin down exactly how Google was planning to make money on it and it was very frustrating to me because we *weren't* planning on making any money on it. We were doing it partly because of competitive reasons (Apple was working on it) but mostly because it was a good thing to do... electronic identification credentials provide a lot more opportunity for privacy-preserving presentation than plastic cards that display all of your info or none, not to mention that someday maybe you'll be able to leave your wallet home.
Anyway, my point wasn't that I don't believe Apple might invest more in accessibility than is required, just that it was a strange answer. Why make such an angry-sounding response when he could just say "Accessibility is good, and required by regulations."? Perhaps if I heard the full context it would make more sense.
It’s easier to do things like sponsor fundamental research or provide unexpected benefits if your company shits out profits. By the same token, small business owners are sometimes the shittiest bosses.
I think small businesses often fail because they don't know how to optimize enough. Apple's business model of a walled garden with high-quality, somewhat overpriced hardware and software that "just works" is largely what lets them not get Mollochized--unlike most Android/Windows devices, they are mostly not in a commodity business competing with the cheapest factory anywhere on Earth.
There could be a big difference between accessibility features designed to technically comply with regulations and features designed to actually produce a good user experience.
We are lucky in London to have this solved with kids' oyster cards which give them free travel (and if they didn't have it for free then parents could top up!) is there no physical alternative in DC?
According to someone in an earlier comment, WMATA does have a card payment system. I think the idea is that the Apple Watch payment method is more convenient by being less likely to get lost/misplaced.
Fair! Smart watches not allowed in most UK schools alongside smartphones, so bit of a cultural difference there!
Can't help wondering if the primary reason why Apple doesn't do this is legal. After all, anything software related oriented around kids has much greater legal liability if something goes wrong, than if it is restricted to adults. Thus, any kids feature, the business ROI must be very compelling to justify the risk. In the case of addictive social media, the compelling ROI is there; in the case of transit passes on Apple Watches, it, unfortunately, isn't.
For your posts whose goal is to hit a tech audience (and are free), I'd suggest submitting them to Hacker News.
Anyone can submit a story to HN, and in this case someone did: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49538363
Look at the HN username 😛
I think right now there is a lot of fair concern over how tech has made us anti social - especially kids. And tech that enabled youth freedom would very much be the opposite.
I also think your point on cities is something a lot of parents miss - your kids could walk to school, which is far superior to school drop-off set ups. Then they took the (city) bus, and presumably could independently go to extracurriculars. In a burb thats neither walkable or transity, kids have to be driven around until 16. Some of that is unavoidable with modern travel sports, but even if you reduce the drive to the weekend games rather than the more frequent practices, youre giving kids independence AND freeing parents up to work or whatever.
A big yard is nice. A public park is nice. A quiet street is nice. Being a mile or less from extracurricular and schools is nice. Owning a minivan is useful, but having transit nearby is too. These are often in tension with each other, but the narrative that "you can't raise kids in a city" has rung hollow to me...
...except for the cost of housing.
In San Francisco we dodge this issue entirely by just not making the kids pay: https://www.sfmta.com/fares/free-muni-all-youth-18-years-and-younger
Seattle too! https://info.myorca.com/youth-ride-free/
If I'm reading this right, I might expect it to have a similar issue to WMATA's system; i.e. you (once you're 7 years old?) need to get and carry your special youth Orca card in order to take advantage of it?
Austin too! https://www.capmetro.org/how-to-ride/riding-with-kids
And Toronto! (Well, 12 and under.) https://www.ttc.ca/Fares-and-passes
Living in the suburbs, setting up an Uber app for your kids is also very nice. We didn't use that for routine travel, but we did / do use it for minor emergencies where someone is stuck at an event that ended early and no drivers are available for a couple hours to get them.
Hi Matt,
This is a great idea, but as I keep hearing over and over, Americans don't want to raise their children in cities! Cities are for childless hipsters and DINKs, and real Americans raise their children in suburbs, with big-ass houses and big lawns and big backyards and big SUVs parked in driveways in front of big garages filled with too much stuff to fit an SUV in there.
So, yeah. You know me, you know I'm a YIMBY and walkable urbanist at heart, and I dearly wish that more American cities were like Boston, but as things are right now, your proposal is relevant to a tiny minority of America's children. BTW, when I was in Poland in July, it was so great to see public transit being used by people of all ages and socioeconomic strata, including families with young children. My mom took public transit to high school when she was a teenager in Krakow. (In Poland we don't have separate middle and high schools; elementary school is grades 1-8, and then high school is the equivalent of grades 9-12, except you restart the numbering, so instead of "grade 9" you say "high school grade 1.")
I'm in-between. I like walking places (although in general I prefer a bike), but a yard is also super-high-value, in away nothing I know of replaces well. That is - you can send a 5-year-old to go play in the yard while helping the 10-year-old with homework, or putting the toddler down for a nap, or just because they have more energy than fits in one house. Parks and busses are great - but "a place where a 5-year-old can play outside without me" is also very helpful.
That doesn't have to be a big yard: a duplex on a 5000-sq-ft lot is big enough.
Streetcar suburbs FTW.
Neighborhood parks had this covered. This is literally what happened at every apartment complex I lived in. The little courtyard park nearby would be where kids congregate.
And if the park isn't safe or something, then I'm all for spending tax payer money to fix that.
We really valued our little neighborhood park in RVA, but I would not have sent a 5-year-old there (it was a couple blocks away) by themself.
And in some places, you could even get arrested for that (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/a-virginia-mom-let-her-5-year-old-walk-alone-a-debate-over-modern-parenting-ensued/ar-AA2bRY7M?)...
Totally fair. Maybe I wouldn't have worried too heavily if they were with their 8yo sibling. And if there is a train of kids on the way there, I think that changes a bit.
That said, remembering 5yo specifically is carrying a lot of weight, there. The years go by so fast that it is hard to remember the specific flipover point from, "no way in heck are you making it that far" to "ok, sure be back in an hour or so."
That is, my gut is my memory of the kids at 5 is actually my memory of them at slightly older ages. :D
Making cities more kid-friendly seems worthwhile on multiple grounds. Ideally, you'd like young couples living in the city not to feel like, as soon as the preganancy test pops positive, they need to call a real estate agent. That requires attention to stuff like public order/safety and public schools as well as public transit, but all that stuff is doable.
The think the piece misses a couple of things.
1.) The majority of the folks building these products themselves don't send their kids on public transit. This is why Apple Maps/Weather were great and accurate in and around Cupertino and took a long time to get better elsewhere.
2.) With my kids (11 and 14) and their friends is this phone vs watch divide. I chose the former route and around half way through their first year of middle school I got the older one a used iPhone and took the extra step of removing access to the web and heavily restricted apps through Screen Time. I'd prefer a flip-phone, but none are available with Find My. Contact is limited to those in their Contacts, those are restricted to who we know personally, no other apps allowed and the phones are locked up during school hours. As far as Apple knows, the device is used by an adult there is no age restriction but from my son's point of view, the device is worthless except to contact us or find out why their friends aren't at the corner on their walk to school. Each year, as they prove their accountability and maturity, we allow additional apps. My oldest started high school, he got a newer phone and his older phone is now wiped and waiting to be activated for his younger brother.
Parenting is hard.
I’ve done the same. Removed Safari and locked most things up via locked screen time restrictions. I gotta say that it is a cumbersome process on older phones and Apple could make that much easier.
Matt was busy so he used a filler column?
Why not just cancel your subscription at this point?
His wife is battling cancer.
I hope she's doing OK.