Understanding Value and Design Choices Made by Android Family App Developers.

The rapidly expanding family mobile app market provides a great opportunity for children's education and development. However, recent research has revealed a prevalence of persuasive designs and tracking of children's data in these apps, which may harm children's online privacy and self-regulation development. We conducted 20 interviews with Android family app developers to understand their design practices. We used the lens of Value Sensitive Design to identify developer's values and how they translate them into design choices. Our findings show that though developer values are generally aligned with the best interest of users, they often must make compromises due to market pressure, lack of monetisation options, and the use of biased design guidelines. Our findings show a need for centralised actionable guidelines and important directions for HCI research to support both end-users' and developers' values.