Here Is How We Trick Your Kids

Diva Melani Hurtado
9 min readMay 13, 2019
Image: Lucas Toledo

Have you ever reviewed your bank account and noticed a bunch of random charges from Apple that you don’t remember making?

Chances are that you have. There’s a reason for this. A recently exposed Facebook memo from 2011 encourages developers to produce deceptive in-app purchases for children’s products in the hopes of generating more revenue. In Facebook’s unfortunate memo, one bullet point read:

“Friendly Fraud — what it is, why it’s challenging, and why you shouldn’t try to block it.”

Sounds pretty sinister, doesn’t it?

I’m not innocent. I’ve been a mobile product manager working in the children’s game industry since 2016 and I have admittingly put some less-than-noble in-app purchase tactics in a recent app I managed. I am not proud of this, and I’ve since asked myself how after a series of small decisions, I wound up tricking children after entering the industry to do nothing more than provide them with good content. To answer this question, I felt it important to document what friendly fraud looks like and speculate on how both developers and consumers can do better.

We’ll start by reviewing some categories of Friendly Fraud I’ve come across while researching various children’s games.

Tactic #1 — Ambiguous Trial Agreements

Free trials are a pretty common tool for subscription apps. Apple’s Paid Applications Agreement* requires every subscription app’s sign-up screen to include details like the subscription name, duration, and some details on the trial. This requirement, however, is now being executed as deceptively as some medical warning labels.

Like the rambling small-text warnings on over-the-counter cold medicine, subscription details can be made small and hard to read. On the apps I’ve worked on, we circumvented Apple’s rules by making the text color very similar to the background, creating the illusion of the text being almost translucent. You can see something similar at work in this screenshot.

Power Painter by ChimpWorks

Even if they are legible, reading the terms don’t help a user understand exactly when the charges will start. I once mistakingly started a year-long subscription for theDay-One Journal app after a trial of only 24 hours. Companies rarely inform users that their free trial is ending and that they are about to start to pay and as such lack of clarity makes it hard for an adult to understand and nearly impossible for a kid to even notice.

Tactic #2 — Misleading “Call-to-Action” Button

All subscription pages have at least one button that triggers the Apple payment confirmation. We tend to call this the “Call-to-Action” button (or CTA button). The design of this button is a science. The color, position, text, and appearance all factor into the success or failure of the app’s revenue. Sometimes, a lack of clarity can actually be beneficial for a company. What I have found in my experience, in fact, is that the less clear the button text is, the more clicks it will get. For example, when the button said something like “START FREE TRIAL”, it was far less successful than then it said something vague like “GET STARTED”.

Companies often mask the button as something playful and unrelated to payment, as in the attached Daily Sticker app. Using words such as “START” or a playful phrase like “GET MY PUZZLE NOW!” masks the fact that the user will begin payment shortly after pushing the button. Even visually, in the daily sticker app example, there is a beautiful unicorn with hearts in his eyes. Even children unable to read will be drawn to touch something with this aesthetic.

The button in this Daily Sticker app example completely blends in with the rest of the environment and can easily sway a kid to purchase something unintentionally.

Tactic #3 — Unclear Navigation Options

Sign-up screens usually contain an exit option or an option to begin a free experience in the app, but the buttons to get there are often intentionally difficult to find.

Voice Translator Speak-On by Vacentras Uab

In the option above, there is initially no exit, and only after a few seconds does the “x” button appear. However, some uncreative companies choose to put an annoying “ARE YOU SURE YOU DON’T WANT AWESOME DEALS?” type pop-up, which often confuses users into completing purchases.

Tactic #4- Deceptive Touch Area Design

When programming a tappable area or a button, a developer controls the button image and the touch area (the area that actually enacts the button).

A developer could program it in such a way that the “touch area” or the area that activates the button, is larger than the appearance of the button in order to increase the chance that a button is clicked. With the imprecision of kids touch, this is an easy way to ensure that your CTA button gets more clicks than possibly intended.

Tactic #5- Covert Unsubscription Information

Often, when people see an unwanted charge on their account, they directly open up the app and go to the app’s settings to guilelessly look for a way to unsubscribe. Companies often omit this information because they have a business that survives off of users forgetting or never knowing they have subscribed. On the last app I worked on, we were hesitant with any push notification features because we were concerned it was going to remind people that they had our app downloaded.

How Is Apple Allowing This To Happen?

These tactics seem shady, so how do they slip through Apple’s app approvals and “strict” App Store Review Guidelines? How do these apps even get into the App Store? The short answer is that Apple’s rules are not clear or strict enough.

The App Store Review Guidelines attempts to admonishes app trickery. They state:

“Apps that attempt to trick users into purchasing a subscription under false pretenses or engage in bait-and-switch practices will be removed from the App Store and you may be removed from the Apple Developer Program.”

But what does “false pretenses” mean? What is considered a bait-and-switch tactic? Because these answers are not detailed in their documentation, there is wiggle room for apps that walk the line to get approved and make money on the App Store. It’s true that Apple appears to have updated its developer documentation in January 2019. It contains a bit more detail on what the visual hierarchy should look like for subscription sign-up pages in order to make things clearer. But is Apple enforcing these rules? Not so much.

Apple Customer Support

With the last app I worked on, we were rejected 2–3 times a month for “unclear subscription details” but we would always copy-and-paste (literally) the same response arguing that we were actually following guidelines and had in fact been approved by other Apple employees. Every time, this canned response allowed us to be approved over and over again without ever making our subscription details clearer. The vagueness of Apple’s guidelines makes it impossible for the app approvers to be strict, because developers can usually make a case for how their app does, in fact, abide by the guidelines.

Another way to get around Apple’s approval guidelines is through shady A/B testing. Imagine a developer creates two different versions of their app, version A being a version that follows the rules and version B being one that does not. Now imagine that when submitting to Apple, the developer only sends their download traffic to version A. After Apple approves the app, the developer can then send users into version B. With this approach, a developer is free to submit basically anything to the app store. As it currently stands, I am not aware of any protection Apple has for this and it leaves the door cracked open for fraudulent versions of the app to be live in the App Store.

Why is Apple Allowing This To Happen?

Obviously, their meager effort to combat scammy apps comes down to one thing…

…money. All subscriptions help Apple’s bottom line since Apple makes a whopping 30% off of ALL sales in the App Store. I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely insane it is that Apple is taking nearly a third of the profits from the 20 million registered developers in the app store. This means every sale is an Apple sale. Because of this, Apple benefits from encouraging subscriptions in the children’s game industry. In my previous article, I discuss more about this push towards subscription. Since I wrote that article I’ve realized that this push from Apple has made the subscription market more competitive and thus more unprincipled.

The fact of the matter is that the subscription model is not good for every product and Apple needs to accept this. Premium apps by nature are more upfront about their pricing because they charge the user upfront and then have the financial freedom to give users total access and not rely on in-app purchases. Unfortunately, there are many also plenty of companies running wild offering free apps and tricking you later. Meanwhile, premium apps — or honest apps, in general — are struggling to compete.

What Should We Do?

Everyone on the other side of the App Store wall is benefiting financially from Friendly Fraud. There’s no reason, then, to expect they’ll discover an incentive to shift towards fairer practices. So, what can we do?

What Apple could do:

  1. Add a report button to App Store. Giving a bad review to a company should not be the worst punishment.
  2. Be stricter with rejecting unclear subscriptions. The lack of rules around rejection has eroded Apple’s once high standards for “approved apps”.

What you could do as a consumer:

  1. Teach your children to be smart consumers. Teach them to look critically at the things that are directly targeting them so they won’t be as susceptible to these schemes. Here are some conventional tips on teaching children about advertising awareness, and some of the same concepts can apply to the app world.
  2. Give bad reviews to companies that you see using these methods and expose them in detail to help prevent other victims. Also, who knows, maybe it will be seen by the development team.

What you could do as a developer:

  1. Hold yourself to a higher standard and create with value-centered design. It is possible to deliver value to people while still making money. That’s what separates the innovative businesses from the average ones.
  2. Even if in-app schemes are working, out of respect for your customers, clarify your subscription details with them. (Added bonus if you email them when their free trial is ending).
  3. Clarify how to unsubscribe to your users. In your settings, have a “manage subscription option”. If someone is looking for a door to leave, hiding the key is only going to cause irreversible damage to your relationship with them and damage to your brand. Instead, think of how you can earn back their interest.
  4. Start valuing your innovating products in innovative ways. Make unique KPIs. If you’re only interested in next quarter’s net revenue you’re going to come out with some short-sighted decisions.

I hope this article has shed some light on the issue of friendly fraud in the children’s game industry. There is a huge chance that you have some personal experience with this issue. Have your children (or you) ever been affected by any of these fraud tactics? Do you feel there is more that we can do as a consumer to fight against this? As a developer, have you experienced building products that felt amoral? Please feel free to comment below with any thoughts you have on this topic. The more we discuss the issue the closer we will get towards fixing the problem.

(As an added bonus for reading to the end, here is information on how to unsubscribe from an app )

A special thanks to the friends I’ve been venting about this to for the last year or so. Thanks to Matt O'Hagan for always keeping my writing tone consistent. To Ashley for her belief in good children’s products. Additional thanks to Gabriel Schicchi, Ryan Bort, Christian Pelaez-Espinosa, Justin Brezhnev, and of course Alexis Foucard.

*Schedule 2, Section 3.8(b)

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Diva Melani Hurtado

Mobile Product Manager @Dashlane in Paris. See my drawings on @divalavidadraws. I love Japanese food, building things, and organizing events. 🍜