Resource Hub: Developers

Emmet O’Neill, a well-known app developer and publisher in the kids space (LEGO DUPLO World), speaks with us about the kids app ecosystem and how Covid-19 is driving compelling trends.

Why parental consent unlocks more revenue and opportunities

Location-based games are poised for massive growth. This segment of the market is estimated to reach $285 billion in value by 2023. Not to be outdone, game developers (and tech giants) are weighing in with ever-more immersive experiences.

Chasing millions of installs is not the sole measure of success – how long users spend in your app and how often they come back is equally important. Push notifications are one of the most effective ways of increasing an app’s user engagement and retention rates.

Building apps in the kids space can sometimes seem complicated. There are many rules and  legal requirements that do not exist when building technology for adults. Luckily, in most cases there are pretty easy solutions around, but they might not be as well known. I wanted to touch on one of those areas today: YouTube embeds. 

Last week Google announced an important revamp of its policies for Play Store apps that are used by children.  With these changes, Google is addressing many of the concerns voiced in recent years by parents, regulators and advocates about the safety of apps that are marketed to kids.

Last week Google announced an update to their policies for kids’ apps in the Google Play store, with significant impact on kids’ publishers.

Kids Web Services (KWS) enables developers to create, build, and manage COPPA/GDPR-K compliant apps and sites aimed at under-13s. As part of operating the KWS SaaS platform within SuperAwesome, we frequently create new databases for our customers, as well as managing several large Postgres databases on RDS.

Kids are spending more time on the internet every day – but the websites and apps they use were primarily designed for use by adults.

At SuperAwesome, we’re focused on making the internet safer for kids. We hire the most talented developers we can find – but more often than not they have little to no experience in our very new sector. So our onboarding process has been designed to turn great software engineers into kidtech engineers, focused on the importance of privacy and children.

If you’re building a game or app for kids (under-13 in the US or under-16 in Europe), you need to consider how you’re going to manage age gates and parental permissions. Both are essential to ensure compliance with data privacy laws (COPPA and GDPR-K), but both are complex user flows and mismanaging them can create barriers to engagement for your easily-distracted young audiences.