Safari would have these same warnings if it was distributed through the App Store. It's just that people expect their phone to come with a web browser.
The 17+ warning is just that—a warning, an indemnificatory disclaimer against lawsuits by angry parents—and only takes effect as a restriction if you switch on parental controls, which also, indeed, exist for Safari itself.
(The "game" part is indeed an oversight—I imagine Apple just never considered that they could be publishing anything other than games that had "mature themes", seeing as 99% of Apps are things like invoice trackers and color swatch wheels, and don't really have "themes" of any kind.)
> Safari would have these same warnings if it was distributed through the App Store. It's just that people expect their phone to come with a web browser.
In fact, Safari can be blocked through the Parental Controls on the iPhone.
Actually, I believe that the store asks you "By clicking OK, you agree that you are at least 17 years old." or something like that and if you click Cancel, it won't download.
Right—they ask it to make sure that you're at least saying that you're 17 years old. They don't require it to be true; it just has to make any lawsuit you could later file get thrown out.
Why would they get a lawsuit? AFAIK, adult websites are already required by law to put a warning. You don't get any such warning when downloading firefox or chrome last time I checked.
AFAIK, adult websites are already required by law to put a warning.
If they're based in the US, maybe, but there is more to the Internet than just the US.
(I'm not sure this is an actual law, though. My guess is that it's a defensive measure against "won't someone PLEASE think of the children" and the resulting legislation. Self-regulation and self-preservation.)
Why don't firefox and chrome have such a warning then?
> If they're based in the US, maybe, but there is more to the Internet than just the US.
I just think it's Apple acting overly prude like banning US political cartoons etc. Being sued because your web browser has access to adult web sites doesn't make sense. Countries where those sites are illegal are already censoring those sites (China, Malaysia etc).
This is not at all surprising. iPhone allows parents to enable restrictions on purchasing application that can access adult content, which of course a generic web browser can. They can also restrict access to the built-in Safari browser.
It's a much better solution than back when they were outright rejecting any application that could access arbitrary content on the internet.
So, if I understand you correctly, Apple should decide what constitutes good parenting?
More fine-grained parental controls would certainly be nice. But what exactly is your hypothesis here? Apple wants to force parents to submit to their ideas of parenting through their design of the parental controls feature on the iPhone? That seems like a pretty stupid hypothesis to me.
It’s not that the parental controls feature is unworthy of discussion. I don’t think it’s particularly well designed. It just seems so completely absurd and ridiculous to claim that bad design must imply that Apple doesn’t want teenagers to surf the web. I’m utterly confused as to how a story like this can get more than forty upvotes on HN.
You can download this app no matter how old you are. It will show a warning dialog but you can just dismiss that and download anyway.
This age limit only matters if parental controls are enabled. You can then pick which apps can be used, based on their age limit (all of them, only 17+, …). Some OS apps like Safari get extra switches – you can explicitly decide whether Safari and a few other things can be used or not.
Age limits are not always the best solution, though (what some parents deem appropriate, others do not). That’s why I think the parental controls are badly designed. Ideally you would get a switch for every app, so that you can override the age based defaults. Such a list would still be pretty horrible from a UI point of view – all your apps replicated in one unstructured list – that’s probably why Apple doesn’t do it. Or maybe they just had no time to implement that feature, yet. Either way, it’s no big deal.
How would you rate a browser, know that you know how the iPhone’s parental controls work? You can access content with it that a vast majority of parents would consider 17+.
(By the way, how do parental controls work on Android? I’m really curious!)
> This age limit only matters if parental controls are enabled. You can then pick which apps can be used, based on their age limit (all of them, only 17+, …). Some OS apps like Safari get extra switches – you can explicitly decide whether Safari and a few other things can be used or not.
Thanks I know how it works, no matter how you put it, limiting browsing the net to +17 year old is ridiculous and actually bad, the internet is the greatest resource for students.
> By the way, how do parental controls work on Android? I’m really curious!
There is none, and that's the way it should be, parental control should be done by... parents, not Steve Jobs. If you have porn addictions like this guy you can still remove the browser, youtube and marketplace apps though: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Android+Market/thread?...
Edit: parental control is password protected on the iPhone, but it can be undone by a reset of the phone, which any kid can do, so it's pretty useless anyway.
This is just poor wording of an important legal point; or, rather, "Apple are not responsible for what your kids browse for on their phone".
Unfortunately we live in a world where a small subset of people will seize on any opportunity to blame a company for some sort of indiscretion - in this case, letting their kids access porn (or whatever).
It's just legal ass covering which >99% of people, sensibly, ignore.
No news here.
EDIT: in iTunes I now see "application" not "game". So either they fixed it or it was a bug for some users.
I always found the idea of parental control of media to be rather badly thought out. What i mean is that my development as a young teen was greatly influenced by my access to violent and sexual music, movies and other content unsuitable for my age group, and yes, even pornography. I consider all of it to be beneficial, because it led to my current development as a person, and even though i don't conciser myself perfect, im quite happy with how I've turned out. Im not a parent but I'd guess that artificial restrictions on technology(which are also easily circumvented) are no substitute for good parenting.
I think parental controls are more about the parent(s) feeling good about themselves. Most probably realize they can't stop their kids from seeing this stuff one way or another but if they are proactive and enable parental controls they can feel like they did everything possible to prevent it.
Really? Enabling parent control on the iPhone blocks both Safari and Opera which means no access to wikipedia and other amazing sources of education just because they may stumble on porn which can be found everywhere anyway? There's nothing to feel good about this. In the meantime, I guess the iFart app is not forbidden, it looks more like "dumbing down kids" than "parental control" to me.
It's not about "dumbing down" kids at all. How many kids are accessing the internet exclusively via an iphone? It's a lot harder to monitor internet usage on a 3.5in screen that can be held in the hand than it is, say, a 17in monitor in the living room. I'm all for letting kids have internet access. I'm also all for monitoring it. You can't do that effectively with an iphone. Sure, kids should have access to the internet, but they don't need it on every single freaking device under the sun.
It is entirely intentional. Likewise, parents can lock access to Safari via the parental controls. I utterly fail to see what's abnormal about it, let alone dumb.
The 17+ warning is just that—a warning, an indemnificatory disclaimer against lawsuits by angry parents—and only takes effect as a restriction if you switch on parental controls, which also, indeed, exist for Safari itself.
(The "game" part is indeed an oversight—I imagine Apple just never considered that they could be publishing anything other than games that had "mature themes", seeing as 99% of Apps are things like invoice trackers and color swatch wheels, and don't really have "themes" of any kind.)