If you try the game and like it – if you've run through the 10 tutorial challenges and thought, "I like this and want more" – there's a separate version of the app that is an up-front, one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all. You pay once and get everything. Get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754342195

Oh, so having a separate (paid for) app makes targeting kids with in app purchases OK in the (free) app you advertise?

If I only released an up-front payment version, people would complain that they weren't able to try the app first. If I only released a free version with in-app purchases, people would complain that they don't like in-app purchases. I did both, and I'm still getting complaints. I get that my solution is imperfect, but I'm trying my best.

I really appreciate you having a full unlocked copy of the game with up front pricing and trying to solve this issue in a thoughtful way.

In the old days, the free version would be a limited preview of the game, and would direct users to purchase the full game. We called it a demo or shareware, as in you were intended to share and copy it widely.

You could also have the “in app purchase” be the full game unlock.

Member it (southpark) :) one could learn some assembler by taking down those limitations and cd checks. Who would thought that it will be useful in reverse engineering malwqre in future? Hah...

Dont get me wrong, at that time very little ppl in my country had ccs to actually buy any software even if, they wouldnt give it to kids :)

This is a solved problem. It's called a "demo". What it entails is giving a small sample of your product completely for free, with no monetization at all, in order to entice a prospective buyer for more. It may be less lucrative than selling microtransactions to literal children, but it is something that people won't complain about, if you are genuinely in the market for a solution and not just trying to farm money off of scamming kids into swiping their parents' credit card because they have no idea what it's worth.

You say "solved problem", then suggest something explicitly banned by Apple's app review guidelines.

1. HN folk are being surprisingly hostile here and it's not cool.

2. Is it really true that "the game is X levels and in-app purchases is a-lot-more-levels" is banned but "the game is Y levels and limited features and in-app purchases gets you features and hints" is not?

I'm confused, because the version you can install for free is literally that: you get the 10 tutorial challenges and 1 subsequent challenge for free, then you have to pay to buy / unlock the full game. How is that different from the classic shareware / demo concept? Obviously it's not banned.

> Demos, betas, and trial versions of your app don’t belong on the App Store – use TestFlight instead.

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bet...

This doesn't apply to a demo with a full product behind it. You can release your "demo" combined as one app, with a small subset of content available for free and the rest locked behind a macrotransaction. Which is what OP already does, except they also have microtransactions targeting children on the side. This essentially only prohibits you from releasing a demo if the demo is for an unfinished product.

ugh, that more i hear about apple the gladder i am that i have never had to go anywhere near the whole slimy mess.

Good early lesson of small business and app development is you can’t make everyone happy. Trying to though will be guaranteed to make at least one person unhappy, and that’s you.

So take advice where it’s offered but don’t mistake complaints for advice.

The HN crowd is touchy on some topics. Don’t take it too personally - good on you for building something cool and shipping it.

FWIW my favorite non-predatory pattern is a level-limited free version with a single “unlock full game” IAP. That way users don’t have to lose their progress switching to paid.

This is just an optimized version of shareware, now that we don't need to mail in a cheque to get the full set of floppies. seems self-defeating to reference anything like "in app purchase" for what's jsut a path for an immediate update after the user completes a known subset of levels.

The issue here is that you are trying to bridge two disparate goals - making money and helping kids.

The fact that this isn’t open source, as it stands, means the latter is not a primary goal - which is not an indictment, just an observation.

The complaints will come, regardless, for that reason alone, given the marketing/narrative.

You’re selling a product to parents/educators who want to gamify the technical education of their children. That market, small as it is, despises micro transactions.

A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.

This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.

You're not arguing against the GP but for the same thing from different angles. They're saying the approach is fighting the goal, while you're just saying "I hope they're successful".

I was responding to the claim that making money is in tension with helping kids learn.

I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.

I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.

My point is that packaging the app in such a way as to put off your target audience is inherently unsustainable business.

I agree with that criticism, and I'd encourage the dev to iterate on non-micro-transaction monetization schemes. The part I disagree with is that a profit motive is antithetical to helping kids.

It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.

What does open sourcing an application have to do with helping kids?

There are plenty of arguments for open sourcing things. “Closed source apps necessarily deprioritize helping children” is not an obvious argument to me. Can you draw the connection more explicitly?

Scale and accessibility - Eliminating any barriers for children to get access to education, etc.

Not to mention, it’s an app trying to help kids get exposed to underpinning technologies - seeing how the game itself is made would be optimizing for that end.

It’s not that closed source deprioritizes, but the “helping kids” were the sole and primary goal sought, there’s a clear answer to what would align with that.

All said, it’s not a critique of the OP - reconciling ideals and practical reality often require trade offs that would allow for a project like this to happen in the first place.

I think it's hugely important to eliminate barriers to get access to education, which is why there's a free, web-based version of Hacktivate that is already being used 350+ schools around the world.

I also think there's a lot of people out there who would pay to have Hacktivate running offline, using the full power of their device, and with no external resources being required, so I made that too.

Suggesting that I need to make them open source to prove I want to help kids learn is really strange, particularly when literally thousands of students around the world are benefitting from my work without paying a cent.

As mentioned, no indictment, and you don’t need to prove anything - helping kids learns is clearly a goal.

But so too is making money off the iOS app, correct?

yes, absolutely. options are always the right thing. nothing wrong with "targeting kids with in app purchases" if you're up front about it

Show them X free levels and with free hints.

When they get into the groove, at X+1 level show them "Did you like this? You can get 200+ levels if you convince your parents that this is a worthwhile investment for your learning." (copy TBD) and bam, you have a traditional game with a demo and a way to buy it that doesn't train kids to expect in-app purchases for every breath they take.

And btw, $25 is high even for an indie steam game, a mobile game will be even harder to market at that price. Just FYI. Best of luck!

Thank you. I am always willing to pay a premium for kids apps that don't have any dark patterns, subscription crap or in app purchases. It's sad that the market has been so corrupted that now customers are asked to pay a premium to keep kids safe and sane.

You'll be pleased to know that the app is not only a one-time payment, but also has zero tracking – no analytics, no logging, no adverts, and no data collection of any kind.

Can I see the source code? Else it's just words :/

Source code wouldn't help, because there's no way to verify any code I showed would be the same as the version on the App Store. Fortunately, you can just watch the network packets leaving from your device when you run the app, and you'll see literally nothing coming to me.

Yep, in-app purchases aimed at kids is always a sensitive area

"sensitive" undersells it. Apple in its refund form has an option to select "unauthorised in-app purchase by a minor" as the reason.

I was not aware how predatory this market has become until an annual subscription after a "one week trial" renewed itself automatically despite having been already cancelled on the last day.

I'm assuming the money is lost because third party subscriptions might require earlier cancellation, but that was the last time I allowed for anything with such a short trial period.

I dig it; and if the kids figure out how to get what they want WITHOUT paying for a damn thing, EVEN BETTER.

Hmm, meanwhile you have whole gaming platforms like Steam, where they basically make huge profit from gambling in games like Counter-strike and others. And hmm whose playing those games?

In defense of the parent comment, I don't know that he suggested that it wasn't effective, but it is a dark pattern that probably should be avoided if the gist of the effort is to truly be an educational game that you'd want to enthusiastically support.

Aren't most micro-transactions like those purely cosmetic?

Yes for Valve, but that hasn't stopped a secondary market transacting tens of thousands of dollars or more for them in some cases.

> https://dmarket.com/blog/most-expensive-csgo-skins

> https://tradeit.gg/csgo/store

They are in Valve's own games. But items drop at different rates, which creates artificial scarciry and items can also be traded for money.

But the makers of CS don't go around telling their game is targeted at kids.

And that's another topic, plus this is part of the gameplay, not just some cosmetic stuff.

That's just part of the meta-game, to get kids to jailbreak the iphone and then patch the IPA

What you describe is practically every Roblox game out there… (yeah it’s horrible )