When I gave a keynote at Droidcon Berlin this month, I issued a challenge: we must stop relying on stale mobile development patterns and focus on being innovators and builders of better options. 

A central risk in mobile development today is that AI is cementing our technical history—including our mistakes and poorly optimized solutions—as gospel. The AI, trained on years of accumulated code, is parroting out aging patterns that have been detrimental to entire classes of users—especially kids.

The AI-amplified "best practices" hyper-prioritize engagement, monetization, and retention, which is why the code patterns it learns have historically not served families well:

• The Engagement Trap: The most successful patterns AI learns to reproduce are how to build apps designed to maximize stickiness and daily use, Session Time and ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), prioritizing passive consumption and maximizing monetization per user over other healthier digital habits.
• The Privacy Compromise: AI is training on a mobile ecosystem with a history of prioritizing feature velocity over data integrity, reinforcing patterns that treat strong privacy, accessibility, and robust offline modes as afterthoughts. These are the very features that kids benefit most from.
• The One-Size-Fits-All UX Sacrifice: For young users, rich, playful, expressive, and accessible interfaces are essential. Historically, delightful visual experiences with native performance were more challenging, resulting in frustrating experiences for users who need immediate, tactile feedback, navigation that works for pre-readers, and delightful features that benefit them, not the business bottom line at their expense.

At Infinite Retry Labs, we are engineering new app building blocks designed for the needs of modern families, ensuring that the next generation of mobile apps champions the unmet needs of families and children in an increasingly digital world.

Watch my full Droidcon 2025 Berlin keynote here:

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Engineering for Today’s Families: Better Options for Control

We are not prescribing how families should live, but we are committed to providing better options to parents and kids.

Our approach centers on treating the risk of excessive engagement seriously and engineering features directly into the core foundation.

Our methodology ensures we are providing guardrails, not absolutes:

• Screen Time Guardrails: We treat high, unmanaged engagement as a risk metric that must be actively managed instead of a metric to be maximized for shareholder value. Our apps include easily configurable engagement safeguards that give parents the tools to configure a healthy digital environment augmented with screen-free options weaved in for better balance.
• Kid-Centric Privacy & Portability: Our focus is on privacy and portability. The foundation we are building ensures minimal data collection and robust support for offline modes, making the apps functional and safe on-the-go. This ensures that user data and experience belong to the family, not the platform. 

Our Commitment to the Community

The work we are doing in building safer, more delightful, and genuinely inspired mobile options for families will yield architectural insights—especially around Kotlin Multiplatform and Compose Multiplatform—and we are committed to sharing many of those building blocks openly with the community.

By doing so, we empower others to help build more thoughtful mobile offerings for kids and families and help ensure that the next generation of AI-taught mobile developers continues to learn from engineering innovators, and doesn’t just teach our industry’s past mistakes.

If these topics resonate with you, please follow along on our engineering blog and if you have kids who might benefit from these solutions, subscribe to our kid-friendly newsletter!