Hey all!
I'm running an anonymous study on app development / tech ethics. I do a ton of work with indie devs and startup founders but with Facebook being wildly covered, one thing I wondered is that if "the smaller guys" care about ethics.
There's no right or wrong answers, I'm just looking to get a sense of things. So if you have 60 seconds to spare, your candid feedback would be so massively appreciated. 🙏🏼
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/18d5twj61AHDt8fmK1xXvIDlw4rOcsupqcpLkBaFZSlQ/edit#responses
Top comments (1)
It would be interesting to see the results of your survey but as a developer myself I feel like the general consensus is turning towards building apps without any shady practices in. Hopefully the fact that Apple have to approve apps themselves adds another layer of scrutiny to your use of user data (although it seems they are more lenient towards apps like Facebook/Instagram/Google compared to smaller apps).
A great website that shows that ethics are becoming important in apps is humanebydesign.com which is a great set of guidelines. Personally I would vocally object if my managers asked me to implement something shady like selling use data to the highest bidder, and I would also question another developer who tried to implement this so I hope a lot of other developers would do this as well. But sadly a lot of this comes down to the bottom line - money, the easiest way to make it isn't to sell an app for a fixed price, but to make it free and sell user data collected using 3rd party SDKs. We seem to be moving more towards a subscription service as a way of consuming apps though so hopefully this should die down.