This seems endemic to all parental things in tech. I swear most of them seem to be done with no user acceptance testing at all. Worse, I think most of them are built by people that don't use them.

The general attitude seems to be that they can take the "build it, and they will come" approach. Who cares what people want, when you can build what you want them to want?

I do wonder if they are being built by developers who have never had kids of their own.

Had this complaint with kindle's time limits. They have it by "weekend" and "weeknight." But... as a parent, I want "school night" versus "non-school night." And those aren't the same thing at all.

After that whole debacle with YouTube and the COPPA, I sort-of wonder if YouTube Kids has to do with anything anyone actually wants, or if it's pretty much just there to serve some kind of purpose for their optics.

My take is that it is what they want. That is, they want parents to put in a fair bit of effort to get their kids engaged.

This is backwards from what parents typically want, as managing another stream of content is obnoxious.

I won't let my kids use YTKids anymore. Besides the app issues, people have figured out how to game their algorithm, and you end up on either an unboxing video or some gore-scare in the middle of a kids video.

My kids only get to use curated experiences where a human has actually picked the content (ie. pretty much every other Kids video app).