[kale]

My daughter has an Android tablet. For a while it was vanilla Android until I realized she was downloading an app, tapping the initial ad on the app, which lead to another app. Repeat ad nauseam until she couldn't install anything else. She isn't able to distinguish quality of apps, and was installing apps that were one giant copyright violation (My little Ponies, Mickey Mouse, and a Minion, all in the same app!).

For the life of me I can't figure out how these apps make money. They're like flotsam in the Google App store, so they're making money somehow. For all I know they turn on the microphone and send the data to a rogue organization.

This is very different to when I grew up. I had to write my games in Basic (I got them in the back of a catalog!) and I learned how to modify them. I plan on giving her free use of any of my Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and if she shows interest in those big, expensive RGB LED matrices, I'll buy those for her. She can go nuts with those!