The whole scheme is such an obvious dark pattern. You have 2 options:
1. About 5 prompts every time a child wants to "buy" something including free stuff.
2. An absolute free for all where a child can have unlimited spend.
Competing app stores would have a MUCH better family sharing setup with proper budgets and controls. Microsoft gets the money end of it right, but sucks at the actual app sharing. Google can't even make their gift cards work properly.
Probably more like the GDPR-non-compliance popups which make it not merely unnecessarily hard to say “no” but which also do it differently in each case so you can’t even learn a pattern for how to quickly say no to everything.
Because I as the parent can choose the kid-friendly app store that allows managing subscriptions in a sane manner. At least until Apple inevitably sherlocks the feature, which they will, because competition forces all participants to improve.
It's far more likely you will end up with alternatives competing by lowering their margins until the point that they need to employ dark patterns to stay viable.
If you think the App Store is bad now I think you will be in for a surprise once it is opened out.
While I agree that most alternative stores will be awful, their mere existence can force Apple to do stuff they don’t currently do.
That said, I expect that a month after the alt stores open, many of the same American lawmakers currently complaining about Apple will suddenly start complaining about how non-American stores don’t give so much as a wet fart what American lawmakers think. (The non-American lawmakers also complaining about Apple are likely to be in favour of this, given at worst the alt store is doing the status quo while at best they're now a local business).
Why? Apple has had no problem moderating it up until this point, if their service is as great as it claims then developers will have no problem forking over 30% of their annual profits for the incredible developer experience the App Store provides! Apple is offering a superior product here, right?
If a small group of people can create, maintain and improve F-Droid[0], I do not think it is that hard when you are the size of Apple/Google to implement something without dark patterns.
As a side note, the parental control stuff on an Android phone are also really bad if you want to help your kids to learn how to cope with the addictive apps while preventing them to fall on really bad content.
A simple stuff, you cannot easily group all the addictive apps together and say "2h max of them in a day".
1. About 5 prompts every time a child wants to "buy" something including free stuff.
2. An absolute free for all where a child can have unlimited spend.
Competing app stores would have a MUCH better family sharing setup with proper budgets and controls. Microsoft gets the money end of it right, but sucks at the actual app sharing. Google can't even make their gift cards work properly.
We need app store competition.