Prosocial Apps

Well-made public software, given away, paid for openly, and held to a standard published in advance.

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What this is

A small suite of applications built for the public good and funded by the people who use them. The first four are children's apps about the real world. They run from a single file, ask for nothing, store nothing, send nothing, and end when they end.

They are free. They will stay free. Nothing in them is a funnel to anything else.

Who is doing this, and why it is me

I am Girish Kumar Krishnan. I trained as a mental health counselor: a two-year master's in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Georgia State University, a year as an intern, and three years practicing in Georgia as a Licensed Associate Professional Counselor — the state's pre-independent credential, practiced under supervision. I let it go when I moved into software in 2018, and I have worked as an engineer since. I am not a practicing clinician and nothing here is clinical advice.

The part that matters for this work is what I spent that time on. Alongside a supervising LPC I ran training seminars for other counselors on video game and process addictions, with a focus on teenagers — process addiction being the clinical term for the compulsive kind that involves no substance at all. So I was not treating a caseload and theorizing about screens afterwards. I was in rooms full of clinicians, working out what we could actually say about how these products land on adolescents, and what we could not.

Some of what we could not say was the diagnosis itself. The World Health Organization recognizes gaming disorder in ICD-11; the American Psychiatric Association still keeps internet gaming disorder in the part of the DSM reserved for conditions needing further study. We were teaching clinicians about something the field had not finished defining, and saying so was part of the material rather than a caveat at the end of it. That habit is the one I brought with me.

That is the whole of my authority here and it is deliberately modest. I know this literature, I know how thin parts of it are, and I know what the inside of a compulsive-use presentation looks like. I am not a researcher. Where I state something as established I will say how it was established, and where I am guessing I will say that instead.

The orientation

There is a well-known argument that adolescent mental health has been damaged by smartphones and social media, and a well-known argument that the problem is the attention economy and the incentives inside persuasive design. This project sits in that territory. It does not sit at the strongest version of either.

Precisely where I stand:

• The problem is the design, not the quantity. "Screen time" as a number is a poor measure and a worse target. What the evidence points at much more clearly is dysregulated use — not being able to stop — which is a property of how a thing is built, not of how long it is used.
• Persuasive design does not tax every child equally. It costs the most from the children with the least capacity to resist it, which is the finding that should decide product questions and almost never does.
• I am more cautious than the popular version of the harm claim. The causal case for a smartphone-driven collapse in adolescent mental health is contested by serious people on effect sizes and on confounding, and it is not settled. The honest headline is smaller than the one most people have read.
• None of that softens the design conclusion. You do not need a proven population-level catastrophe to say that a variable reward schedule aimed at a nine-year-old is indefensible. The case against it stands on its own.

The reasoning and the sources are in ATTENTION_RUBRIC.md. Where this project's position and the popular one differ, the rubric is the one that governs.

What gets built

First, children's education. Apps about size, distance, time and the shapes of the orbits — things a screen can show that a book cannot, which is the only good reason for a screen to be involved.

Then civic education and civic engagement. How a bill becomes law and where it actually dies. What a local budget contains. What a district boundary does. Who decides, at which level, and how a person reaches them. This is the same problem as the science apps: real material, treated seriously, for people usually handed a cartoon of it.

Then anything where a well-maintained public application contributes to the social good — with well-maintained doing real work in that sentence. The world does not need more launched software. It needs software somebody is still looking after in five years.

And a strand running through all of it: teaching how any of this works. Where data is stored and who can read it. What encryption does and what it does not. What actually happens when a request crosses a network, and how many parties see it. What privacy means in a century where the word has been hollowed out by the people with the most reason to hollow it.

An organization whose apps collect nothing is in an unusually good position to teach that honestly, because it has nothing to protect.

Three rubrics

1 · How an app treats the people using it. Published, in force, and applied to our own work in public: THE_STANDARD.md. Twelve signs, two points each. Our own apps score 21, 22, 24 and 24, and the low marks are named rather than buried. One sign — whether an app lets go when a child is asked to stop — we cannot honestly award ourselves without somebody watching a real child, and the scorecard says so.

2 · What it cost. A rubric under construction, and as far as I know nobody publishes this. It should answer, for every app: what it cost to build, in hours and in money; what it costs to run each month, and per person using it; where that money came from; what any maintainer is paid; and what happens to the app if the funding stops. Software asks for trust and discloses less about its economics than a tin of soup.

3 · Whether it tells the truth about itself. Transparency of data practices, stated in terms a person can check rather than a policy they cannot read. What leaves the device. What is kept, where, and for how long. Who else is involved. And for us the answers are mostly nothing, nothing and nobody — which is easy to say and is worth being able to prove.

How members shape it

Anyone who donates can leave feedback, comment publicly on any app, and vote on what gets built next. The queue is theirs to order.

Two boundaries on that, stated now so they are not negotiated later:

• A donation buys a vote on priorities. It does not buy a vote on content, and it does not buy an exemption from the standard. If the most-requested app cannot be built without failing THE_STANDARD.md, it does not get built, and the reason gets published.
• Voting lives on this website and never inside an app. The apps have no accounts, no network and no way to ask anybody for anything, and that is not an implementation detail — sign A5 of our own standard scores zero for anything sold inside a child's activity. The funding mechanism does not get to compromise the thing being funded.

I should be straight that donor voting is a specific choice with a real weakness: it weights the people who can afford to give. It is what I can actually run today. If a better mechanism turns up, this is the paragraph that will change.

What this will not do

• No advertising, ever, anywhere near a child's activity.
• No variable rewards — no streaks, spins, surprises or loot. It is the single design feature the longitudinal evidence implicates most directly, and it is the easiest thing in the world to add by accident, because it makes engagement numbers rise.
• No accounts, birthdays, photographs, locations or microphones in the apps.
• No data sold, shared or brokered, because none is collected.
• No engagement metric as a goal. An app people put down when they are finished is working correctly.

What I do not know yet

Whether a donation-funded model can pay for software that is maintained for a decade. Whether the cost rubric survives contact with its first embarrassing number. Whether apps built to be put down can reach anyone at all in an attention market that rewards the opposite. And whether the four apps that exist actually let go when a child is asked to stop — which nobody has watched happen, and which is the most important thing on the list.

Those are open, and they will be reported on as they close.

The apps