Do It For the Children

Shortly after arriving home for Thanksgiving break, I was given the task of adding parental controls to my little brother's tablet (a nexus 7 running Android 4.3 Jelly Bean) by my ever-neurotic mother. Being a Computer Science major, I figured this would be a simple task, and I brushed it off like it was nothing to worry about. It turns out, however, that this simple task is not quite as easy as it seems.

All I had to do was make sure that my brother could not download any more apps and filter the web browser. In order to block other apps, I simply created a new user and made my brother a “restricted user”, giving me complete control over his apps. This was the easy part. Next I had to filter the web browser. As it turns out, the Google Chrome app does not have any support for parental controls or restricted users. While it is possible to filter Chrome on a desktop, this functionality has not yet crossed over to the mobile platform. After two hours of tweaking Chrome's settings and getting no results, I finally decided to use Mozilla instead.

It amazes me that in a society where every child owns a tablet and middle school children have cell phones, mobile developers have managed to avoid parental controls so blatantly. It is harder than ever for parents to be able to monitor their children, when really the opposite should be true. Not only is the absence of parental controls poorly affecting an application's user experience, but it also eliminates potential users. If these apps get used by children while they are young, the children will likely use them as adults. Companies should be looking to gain as many younger users as possible, and this is the easiest way to do it. Adding parental controls could take less than an hour of coding, and could welcome many more users.

Many users, not just children, could benefit from more filtering options. For example, it would be very useful if Snapchat would give the ability to mark a message as nsfw. Of course this would require user cooperation, but it could make for a much more pleasant use of Snapchat at work or in class. Little additions like these would greatly enhance any user's experience and they can be used without hindering other users at all. It surprises me a lot that not all apps include these important features, in fact most do not.

The main point is that we still need to keep parental controls as a focus when developing software. It should not be a project to set up parental controls in this generation. We need to get parental controls back to the AOL days of old, when they were easy to set up and could filter efficiently, without being cumbersome to an unrestricted user. Google really needs to step up its game in this department, or it will lose more users, just as it lost my little brother today.