If you try the game and like it – if you've run through the 10 tutorial challenges and thought, "I like this and want more" – there's a separate version of the app that is an up-front, one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all. You pay once and get everything. Get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754342195
When they get into the groove, at X+1 level show them "Did you like this? You can get 200+ levels if you convince your parents that this is a worthwhile investment for your learning." (copy TBD) and bam, you have a traditional game with a demo and a way to buy it that doesn't train kids to expect in-app purchases for every breath they take.
And btw, $25 is high even for an indie steam game, a mobile game will be even harder to market at that price. Just FYI. Best of luck!
If I only released an up-front payment version, people would complain that they weren't able to try the app first. If I only released a free version with in-app purchases, people would complain that they don't like in-app purchases. I did both, and I'm still getting complaints. I get that my solution is imperfect, but I'm trying my best.
I really appreciate you having a full unlocked copy of the game with up front pricing and trying to solve this issue in a thoughtful way.
In the old days, the free version would be a limited preview of the game, and would direct users to purchase the full game. We called it a demo or shareware, as in you were intended to share and copy it widely.
You could also have the “in app purchase” be the full game unlock.
Member it (southpark) :) one could learn some assembler by taking down those limitations and cd checks. Who would thought that it will be useful in reverse engineering malwqre in future? Hah...
Dont get me wrong, at that time very little ppl in my country had ccs to actually buy any software even if, they wouldnt give it to kids :)
This is a solved problem. It's called a "demo". What it entails is giving a small sample of your product completely for free, with no monetization at all, in order to entice a prospective buyer for more. It may be less lucrative than selling microtransactions to literal children, but it is something that people won't complain about, if you are genuinely in the market for a solution and not just trying to farm money off of scamming kids into swiping their parents' credit card because they have no idea what it's worth.
1. HN folk are being surprisingly hostile here and it's not cool.
2. Is it really true that "the game is X levels and in-app purchases is a-lot-more-levels" is banned but "the game is Y levels and limited features and in-app purchases gets you features and hints" is not?
I'm confused, because the version you can install for free is literally that: you get the 10 tutorial challenges and 1 subsequent challenge for free, then you have to pay to buy / unlock the full game. How is that different from the classic shareware / demo concept? Obviously it's not banned.
This doesn't apply to a demo with a full product behind it. You can release your "demo" combined as one app, with a small subset of content available for free and the rest locked behind a macrotransaction. Which is what OP already does, except they also have microtransactions targeting children on the side. This essentially only prohibits you from releasing a demo if the demo is for an unfinished product.
Good early lesson of small business and app development is you can’t make everyone happy. Trying to though will be guaranteed to make at least one person unhappy, and that’s you.
So take advice where it’s offered but don’t mistake complaints for advice.
The HN crowd is touchy on some topics. Don’t take it too personally - good on you for building something cool and shipping it.
FWIW my favorite non-predatory pattern is a level-limited free version with a single “unlock full game” IAP. That way users don’t have to lose their progress switching to paid.
This is just an optimized version of shareware, now that we don't need to mail in a cheque to get the full set of floppies. seems self-defeating to reference anything like "in app purchase" for what's jsut a path for an immediate update after the user completes a known subset of levels.
The issue here is that you are trying to bridge two disparate goals - making money and helping kids.
The fact that this isn’t open source, as it stands, means the latter is not a primary goal - which is not an indictment, just an observation.
The complaints will come, regardless, for that reason alone, given the marketing/narrative.
You’re selling a product to parents/educators who want to gamify the technical education of their children. That market, small as it is, despises micro transactions.
A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.
This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.
I agree with that criticism, and I'd encourage the dev to iterate on non-micro-transaction monetization schemes. The part I disagree with is that a profit motive is antithetical to helping kids.
It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.
You're not arguing against the GP but for the same thing from different angles. They're saying the approach is fighting the goal, while you're just saying "I hope they're successful".
I was responding to the claim that making money is in tension with helping kids learn.
I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.
I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.
What does open sourcing an application have to do with helping kids?
There are plenty of arguments for open sourcing things. “Closed source apps necessarily deprioritize helping children” is not an obvious argument to me. Can you draw the connection more explicitly?
Scale and accessibility - Eliminating any barriers for children to get access to education, etc.
Not to mention, it’s an app trying to help kids get exposed to underpinning technologies - seeing how the game itself is made would be optimizing for that end.
It’s not that closed source deprioritizes, but the “helping kids” were the sole and primary goal sought, there’s a clear answer to what would align with that.
All said, it’s not a critique of the OP - reconciling ideals and practical reality often require trade offs that would allow for a project like this to happen in the first place.
I think it's hugely important to eliminate barriers to get access to education, which is why there's a free, web-based version of Hacktivate that is already being used 350+ schools around the world.
I also think there's a lot of people out there who would pay to have Hacktivate running offline, using the full power of their device, and with no external resources being required, so I made that too.
Suggesting that I need to make them open source to prove I want to help kids learn is really strange, particularly when literally thousands of students around the world are benefitting from my work without paying a cent.
Thank you. I am always willing to pay a premium for kids apps that don't have any dark patterns, subscription crap or in app purchases. It's sad that the market has been so corrupted that now customers are asked to pay a premium to keep kids safe and sane.
You'll be pleased to know that the app is not only a one-time payment, but also has zero tracking – no analytics, no logging, no adverts, and no data collection of any kind.
Source code wouldn't help, because there's no way to verify any code I showed would be the same as the version on the App Store. Fortunately, you can just watch the network packets leaving from your device when you run the app, and you'll see literally nothing coming to me.
"sensitive" undersells it. Apple in its refund form has an option to select "unauthorised in-app purchase by a minor" as the reason.
I was not aware how predatory this market has become until an annual subscription after a "one week trial" renewed itself automatically despite having been already cancelled on the last day.
I'm assuming the money is lost because third party subscriptions might require earlier cancellation, but that was the last time I allowed for anything with such a short trial period.
Hmm, meanwhile you have whole gaming platforms like Steam, where they basically make huge profit from gambling in games like Counter-strike and others. And hmm whose playing those games?
In defense of the parent comment, I don't know that he suggested that it wasn't effective, but it is a dark pattern that probably should be avoided if the gist of the effort is to truly be an educational game that you'd want to enthusiastically support.
In the early 2000s, growing up in a third-world country with limited resources meant computers and operating systems were constantly breaking. That scarcity pushed me to tinker and experiment, I learned to troubleshoot hardware, reinstall OSes, and reverse-engineer odd behaviors. I even experimented with keyloggers out of curiosity. That practical, trial-and-error schooling is where a lot of the so called “common sense” about security comes from. It is less theory, more failing, fixing, and learning what actually keeps one safe online.
I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.
Started modding Android ROMs at 13. That age is perfect; old enough to understand consequences, young enough to not care about breaking things.
Hardware hacking tools have gotten more accessible since then. The Flipper Zero makes this easier now; 256KB RAM, open firmware, $200. Compare that to needing a full PC setup in the 2000s. Lower barrier, same curiosity-driven learning.
Guided challenges vs pure exploration; both work. The structure gets more people started. The ones who stick around will break out of the sandbox anyway.
“El hambre agudiza el ingenio”, we say in Spanish. Hunger sharpens the mind.
Growing up with fewer resources than others paradoxically leads to better outcomes sometimes, since you’re conscious of the barriers around you and that motivates you to overcome them.
If I had grown up with the latest iPhone I would never have cared about rooting and custom ROMs, for example.
Early 90's were more fun. I modified DOS command.com file to change the outputs it prints, drilled holes into laptop to attach broken hinges, break electronic garbage to salvage wires and interesting things, disassemble disk drives, ...
Haha that reminds me, Qbasic using the help file to figure out how to program. Taking apart a HD and getting my fingers pinched between the two bloody strong magnets.
Amazing what you learn when you have no other distraction xD
I agree that the early 90's were a lot of fun – I remember drilling holes in 3.5-inch floppy disks to increase their capacity, blissfully unaware that actual HD floppies had a different coating entirely…
I suspect gamifying it isn't enough, but as you say it's a step, and if it helps more people get involved then hopefully others can provide more steps to follow.
I don't think you can recreate this in any top-down manner no matter how well-intentioned.
It has to matter to them, and what's more, it gives you extra boost if you aren't supposed to do it and no parent or teacher pats you on the shoulder, but rather your friends or people in online forums like it, or simply you like it for yourself, seeing that the computer does what you want.
I learned computers by making a website for my school class, where we would put pictures from events and excursions, hosted a chat and a phpbb, designed the graphical elements in cracked warez Photoshop etc. This forced me to naturally pick up the skills. HTML, JS, burning ISO to CD, downloading things etc. Also warez games, learning about the Program Files difectory at like age 8 and how to copy the cracked exe there. Or setting up port forwarding for multi-player gaming.
Or when I modded GTA (3/VC/SA) with new car models that I built in 3D modeling software based on hunting down the orthographic projection blueprints of our family car, or adding the police vehicles from my country in GTA, messing with textures etc.
Or translating games from English, reverse engineering the binary file that contained the strings, I figures out that the length of each string was also there and I had to modify that too, learn about big endian and little endian, learn to work with a hex editor, understand what hex is. It was super exciting. If I had a lecture from some teacher about hex representation with some exercises at the end of the chapter for homework, I likely would have found it boring. But here I had context, I had a goal, and I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the hex editor, I just saw that people used similar tools for translating other games and so I tried on less popular games where nobody had a specialized tool yet, it felt like making discoveries, going deep into the jungle and prevailing.
Now to contradict myself, I did have a lot of fun also while solving PythonChallenge.com, even though it's artificial tasks. But at least I found it myself online and wasn't handed to me and nobody knew or cared that I was working on it.
So I think this is just really hard to externally motivate if the kids don't have any desires or drive to see some effect caused by them. And maybe even I wouldn't do it in the current software and phone environment.
But we also have to remember that a generation ago it was also not many people who were really into computers.
I have found this while trying to teach my kids how to write anything software related from scratch. They've done some code.org, but it becomes boring quickly. We tried to make tic-tac-toe in js/html/css since they can do they whole thing in the browser. It held their attention slightly longer, but still became boring. It's not something they want to do.
I totally agree with you on learning for a purpose, picking up knowledge is super easy imo when you're in pursuit of a goal bigger than picking up knowledge. You don't even realize all of the things you learn in order to achieve your goal. But you have to want a goal.
I also totally agree sometimes it's fun to just do dumb problems, I found these CAD modeling youtube videos where guys will race each other modeling some part off of a print, spent a week just screwing around with those because it's fun to flex sometimes.
On the other hand if I'm honest, all this noodling around as a teen didn't give me a super robust foundation at all. I had a kind of folk understanding, or rough mental model of the things but it made me like it as a hobby and identify with it, which pushed me to take up CS in college.
It gave me some head start that I knew Python and JS when learning C, but not super much. Other students, who were smart but didn't fiddle with computers as much, generally picked these things up along the way, 4-5 years college is plenty time to develop the skills if you got the talent.
Also my understanding of networks was super shallow based on just multi player gaming and learning router settings, and I only really built a proper mental model in college with OSI model, TCP/IP details, reading the Tanenbaum book, doing socket programming etc.
So these generic tech and computer skills are in my opinion more about giving people a sense of agency, which is still quite something. That you put together your own PC, that you download your own subtitle files for the movies and figure out how to adjust the sync to match your version of the movie etc. It just gives you a feeling that you can do things. If something is wrong, you can, and therefore want to fix it. It's a different attitude compared to just accepting everything as it is.
The supposed target of this game do not at all match who can actually play it. Kids don't have Macs. Those who want to hack don't have iPhones. I would even say that a kid with an iPhone will never get the necessary curiosity about computers to want to hack anything.
My son has been highly motivated to learn about hacking in his iPad to hack some of the games they play for school (blooket and prodigy). Those are web based games, true, but fiddling with the dev console, editing the dom, and finding and pasting scripts, is not nothing.
Curiosity is not something you are born with, yes. It's influenced by the experiences you have. I don't think iPhones allow for the experiences that push kids to want to hack things. It is pretty much a sealed environment where all details about how the computer works is hidden behind some app. Even access to the filesystem (iirc from my 2014 experience) is hidden away (like being unable to access your picture files except through the gallery app). That kind of environment stiffles curiosity imo.
i think this is a terrible assumption to make.
the computer or phone a kid gets from their parents has nothing to do with their curiosity, intelligence, interests or ambitions.
The native version does quite a few extra things, including bringing all the solving tools inside the app (as opposed to using external tools like CyberChef, Boxentriq, Dcode, etc), but also has more compute-intensive operations like creating spectrograms of audio and image manipulation, a much bigger implementation of the Linux terminal, and (safely!) destructive things too – you get local copies of files or databases to work with, so you can delete them, modify them, etc, freely, rather than being restricted to working with shared resources.
>And if you’re dead set against Apple devices, you should check out the web version of Hacktivate – it’s not as powerful or as fun, but it’s entirely web-based and free!)
I have not used the app but the developer Paul Hudson was the guy who taught me Swift and UIKit when I was in college and wanted to dig into iOS development for fun. He’s truly gifted when it comes to teaching.
Thank you for your kind words! I've spent over a decade teaching folks to build apps, and it's something I hope I can continue doing for a long time to come.
Thank you! I poured a lot of time and energy into making sure challenges are unique and interesting, but also graded so folks follow a cohesive pathway, and also feel fun – it's as close to a "Hollywood-hacker" aesthetic as I could get.
Nice, I am a fan of this idea and have been trying to figure out the right way to engage my niece in computers in a real way. One of my biggest concerns from seeing how it impacted my stepdaughter (now in college) is how kids are not learning how general purpose computers work and are becoming too comfortable existing entirely in restricted environments like iPads and Chromebooks. With my niece, I'm taking more active measures to ensure she learns how things actually work.
I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
Cool idea I was going to check it out but I don’t want to update my iPad to the latest OS for jailbreaky reasons. Any chance you could release support for something slightly before 18.5?
The app only uses one API from iOS 18 and later, so from a coding perspective I could make it support older versions easily. However, the bigger problem is testing: right now I test each release thoroughly on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, across iOS 18 and iOS 26, so adding another iOS version would require another set of devices and more time.
>how to do SQL injection, how to use rainbow tables to figure out hashes, how to use steganography to hide data in images, and more.
I feel like there are more practical and timeless topics that will still be relevant in 2040. Frameworks (abstraction) have largely solved SQL injection and bad cryptography.
Personally I would avoid a cybersecurity focused corriculum and just focus on regular software engineering. Being able to think like who you are attacking and knowing the common pitfalls is most of the battle.
Eh… I just went to Stack Overflow and searched for "php mysql", and the first result (https://stackoverflow.com/q/79790370) – asked 12 days ago – had SQL injection
This is part of the long tail. I think you are underestimating the role AI is going to be playing in 2040. ChatGPT can already solve that stack overflow question and make the code use the prepared statement correctly. AI will play a pivotal role in helping with the long tail of these issues.
If it's all the same to you, I'm going to focus on inspiring people with today's technology, and hopefully help fuel their curiosity to learn about what comes in the future – whatever that may be.
This is why I like the Try Hack Me platform so much. You have a lot of walkthroughs and guided challenges to get started and learn the basics; challenges get harder and harder with less and less help. You also have access to challenge write-ups even if you did not complete them, meaning that if you're stuck, instead of losing motivation, you can make progress.
They embrace learning for all levels and helped me so much getting into infosec professionally.
Also the game costs 20 bucks but it's offered as "Free" with "in app purchases". But you can only play one challenge until you need to buy the game. That's just false advertising. Just be upfront about it and sell the game for 20 bucks instead.
I'm not sure where you got the one challenge thing from – you can play 10 challenges without needing to pay a cent. Plus, there is a dedicated version you can buy up front front without any in-app purchases, right here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...
All you have to do to unlock the next free challenge is solve the previous challenge. The first 10 tutorials are designed to teach the basics of the app – how to transform data with the toolbox, how to read web page source code and run JavaScript, basic Linux commands, etc – and so they are run in order. There are 10 in total, all free, plus another one in the first territory afterwards, which teaches the basics of ciphers.
So there's our misunderstanding. I skipped the tutorial, because I already saw your demo video. Then I clicked on the US on the map and played the first challenge called "Tutorial: Cipher salad". After that I always got the "Buy now" popup when I tried to play another challenge.
But you're right, the tutorial is playable too and it consists of the same kind of challenges, not just simple explanations how to play. So my initial statement was not correct.
I see. Well, I hope you can appreciate there are limits to what I can do – if someone skips the free challenges then is unhappy there aren't enough free challenges, I don't really know how I can fix that. If you want to go back to play the tutorial challenges, they remain available.
I've watched my grandma play a mobile game a few days ago. It has been a simple word search game. A level takes her about 2-3 minutes to beat. Every single time she beats a level, she is getting 1-2 30 second advertisements that she has to sit through. Its honestly so sad to see. Thankfully she knows that all mobile ads are bullshit and how to close them, but still... This market is shameless.
Nothing about Hacktivate is pay-to-win – you can solve every challenge without using a single hint, and even if someone does need hints there are a bunch given away for free. Even more, for people who want the game but don't want micro-transactions, there's a dedicated version of the game (https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...) that is a one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all.
Right, that's absolutely disgusting. The only reason that would be somewhat OK is if that's part of the game, and you can hack it to get tokens for free.
Do you also teach kids about jail time and/or being blackballed by the industry? Because no matter how well-intentioned you are I can see a 13 year old me doing the naughty thing.
No, but I like the idea – I think it might make for a good screen to add once they complete the game, saying "use your skills responsibly" and similar. Thank you!
Those cybersecurity challenges are incredible – I see kids light up when they take part, finding a passion for something they didn't even known existed previously. I don't think the teams who organize them get enough recognition for their incredible work!
As an outsider, are you suggesting OP can make more sales on Android because that’s more hacker friendly? Or what exactly? From what I hear no one makes any money on apps outside the Apple ecosystem and big game platforms.
Cool idea and execution but having in-app purchases to buy hints for a game targeted to kids is a big no.
I get the market forces and such but I don't want to have an app subtly teach my non-existent kids to reach out to in-app purchases like that.
If you try the game and like it – if you've run through the 10 tutorial challenges and thought, "I like this and want more" – there's a separate version of the app that is an up-front, one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all. You pay once and get everything. Get it here: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754342195
Show them X free levels and with free hints.
When they get into the groove, at X+1 level show them "Did you like this? You can get 200+ levels if you convince your parents that this is a worthwhile investment for your learning." (copy TBD) and bam, you have a traditional game with a demo and a way to buy it that doesn't train kids to expect in-app purchases for every breath they take.
And btw, $25 is high even for an indie steam game, a mobile game will be even harder to market at that price. Just FYI. Best of luck!
Oh, so having a separate (paid for) app makes targeting kids with in app purchases OK in the (free) app you advertise?
If I only released an up-front payment version, people would complain that they weren't able to try the app first. If I only released a free version with in-app purchases, people would complain that they don't like in-app purchases. I did both, and I'm still getting complaints. I get that my solution is imperfect, but I'm trying my best.
I really appreciate you having a full unlocked copy of the game with up front pricing and trying to solve this issue in a thoughtful way.
In the old days, the free version would be a limited preview of the game, and would direct users to purchase the full game. We called it a demo or shareware, as in you were intended to share and copy it widely.
You could also have the “in app purchase” be the full game unlock.
Member it (southpark) :) one could learn some assembler by taking down those limitations and cd checks. Who would thought that it will be useful in reverse engineering malwqre in future? Hah...
Dont get me wrong, at that time very little ppl in my country had ccs to actually buy any software even if, they wouldnt give it to kids :)
This is a solved problem. It's called a "demo". What it entails is giving a small sample of your product completely for free, with no monetization at all, in order to entice a prospective buyer for more. It may be less lucrative than selling microtransactions to literal children, but it is something that people won't complain about, if you are genuinely in the market for a solution and not just trying to farm money off of scamming kids into swiping their parents' credit card because they have no idea what it's worth.
You say "solved problem", then suggest something explicitly banned by Apple's app review guidelines.
1. HN folk are being surprisingly hostile here and it's not cool.
2. Is it really true that "the game is X levels and in-app purchases is a-lot-more-levels" is banned but "the game is Y levels and limited features and in-app purchases gets you features and hints" is not?
I'm confused, because the version you can install for free is literally that: you get the 10 tutorial challenges and 1 subsequent challenge for free, then you have to pay to buy / unlock the full game. How is that different from the classic shareware / demo concept? Obviously it's not banned.
> Demos, betas, and trial versions of your app don’t belong on the App Store – use TestFlight instead.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/#bet...
This doesn't apply to a demo with a full product behind it. You can release your "demo" combined as one app, with a small subset of content available for free and the rest locked behind a macrotransaction. Which is what OP already does, except they also have microtransactions targeting children on the side. This essentially only prohibits you from releasing a demo if the demo is for an unfinished product.
ugh, that more i hear about apple the gladder i am that i have never had to go anywhere near the whole slimy mess.
Good early lesson of small business and app development is you can’t make everyone happy. Trying to though will be guaranteed to make at least one person unhappy, and that’s you.
So take advice where it’s offered but don’t mistake complaints for advice.
The HN crowd is touchy on some topics. Don’t take it too personally - good on you for building something cool and shipping it.
FWIW my favorite non-predatory pattern is a level-limited free version with a single “unlock full game” IAP. That way users don’t have to lose their progress switching to paid.
This is just an optimized version of shareware, now that we don't need to mail in a cheque to get the full set of floppies. seems self-defeating to reference anything like "in app purchase" for what's jsut a path for an immediate update after the user completes a known subset of levels.
The issue here is that you are trying to bridge two disparate goals - making money and helping kids.
The fact that this isn’t open source, as it stands, means the latter is not a primary goal - which is not an indictment, just an observation.
The complaints will come, regardless, for that reason alone, given the marketing/narrative.
You’re selling a product to parents/educators who want to gamify the technical education of their children. That market, small as it is, despises micro transactions.
A sustainable business has the capacity to help a lot more kids than an unfinished open source project that never gets released on iOS because no one wants to pay the developer fee.
This isn’t “HackVille by Zynga,” it’s an indie dev trying to make a product they believe in. I hope it succeeds and inspires more high quality edutainment.
My point is that packaging the app in such a way as to put off your target audience is inherently unsustainable business.
I agree with that criticism, and I'd encourage the dev to iterate on non-micro-transaction monetization schemes. The part I disagree with is that a profit motive is antithetical to helping kids.
It'd be nice if we had robust, no-strings attached funding streams to make this kind of content, but we don't, so if we want it to exist, consumers need to pay for it.
You're not arguing against the GP but for the same thing from different angles. They're saying the approach is fighting the goal, while you're just saying "I hope they're successful".
I was responding to the claim that making money is in tension with helping kids learn.
I think it’s fair to claim that a large enterprise will eventually crank the money dial to maximum extraction. But a solo dev is free to follow their conscience and make money in a responsible way.
I don’t like the “pay per hint” model as currently implemented, but I’m willing to give the developer the benefit of the doubt that they didn’t think it all the way through.
What does open sourcing an application have to do with helping kids?
There are plenty of arguments for open sourcing things. “Closed source apps necessarily deprioritize helping children” is not an obvious argument to me. Can you draw the connection more explicitly?
Scale and accessibility - Eliminating any barriers for children to get access to education, etc.
Not to mention, it’s an app trying to help kids get exposed to underpinning technologies - seeing how the game itself is made would be optimizing for that end.
It’s not that closed source deprioritizes, but the “helping kids” were the sole and primary goal sought, there’s a clear answer to what would align with that.
All said, it’s not a critique of the OP - reconciling ideals and practical reality often require trade offs that would allow for a project like this to happen in the first place.
I think it's hugely important to eliminate barriers to get access to education, which is why there's a free, web-based version of Hacktivate that is already being used 350+ schools around the world.
I also think there's a lot of people out there who would pay to have Hacktivate running offline, using the full power of their device, and with no external resources being required, so I made that too.
Suggesting that I need to make them open source to prove I want to help kids learn is really strange, particularly when literally thousands of students around the world are benefitting from my work without paying a cent.
As mentioned, no indictment, and you don’t need to prove anything - helping kids learns is clearly a goal.
But so too is making money off the iOS app, correct?
yes, absolutely. options are always the right thing. nothing wrong with "targeting kids with in app purchases" if you're up front about it
Thank you. I am always willing to pay a premium for kids apps that don't have any dark patterns, subscription crap or in app purchases. It's sad that the market has been so corrupted that now customers are asked to pay a premium to keep kids safe and sane.
You'll be pleased to know that the app is not only a one-time payment, but also has zero tracking – no analytics, no logging, no adverts, and no data collection of any kind.
Can I see the source code? Else it's just words :/
Source code wouldn't help, because there's no way to verify any code I showed would be the same as the version on the App Store. Fortunately, you can just watch the network packets leaving from your device when you run the app, and you'll see literally nothing coming to me.
I dig it; and if the kids figure out how to get what they want WITHOUT paying for a damn thing, EVEN BETTER.
That's just part of the meta-game, to get kids to jailbreak the iphone and then patch the IPA
Yep, in-app purchases aimed at kids is always a sensitive area
"sensitive" undersells it. Apple in its refund form has an option to select "unauthorised in-app purchase by a minor" as the reason.
I was not aware how predatory this market has become until an annual subscription after a "one week trial" renewed itself automatically despite having been already cancelled on the last day.
I'm assuming the money is lost because third party subscriptions might require earlier cancellation, but that was the last time I allowed for anything with such a short trial period.
Hmm, meanwhile you have whole gaming platforms like Steam, where they basically make huge profit from gambling in games like Counter-strike and others. And hmm whose playing those games?
In defense of the parent comment, I don't know that he suggested that it wasn't effective, but it is a dark pattern that probably should be avoided if the gist of the effort is to truly be an educational game that you'd want to enthusiastically support.
But the makers of CS don't go around telling their game is targeted at kids.
And that's another topic, plus this is part of the gameplay, not just some cosmetic stuff.
Aren't most micro-transactions like those purely cosmetic?
Yes for Valve, but that hasn't stopped a secondary market transacting tens of thousands of dollars or more for them in some cases.
> https://dmarket.com/blog/most-expensive-csgo-skins
> https://tradeit.gg/csgo/store
They are in Valve's own games. But items drop at different rates, which creates artificial scarciry and items can also be traded for money.
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What you describe is practically every Roblox game out there… (yeah it’s horrible )
In the early 2000s, growing up in a third-world country with limited resources meant computers and operating systems were constantly breaking. That scarcity pushed me to tinker and experiment, I learned to troubleshoot hardware, reinstall OSes, and reverse-engineer odd behaviors. I even experimented with keyloggers out of curiosity. That practical, trial-and-error schooling is where a lot of the so called “common sense” about security comes from. It is less theory, more failing, fixing, and learning what actually keeps one safe online.
I think it all stemmed from curiosity to learn and tinker. I wonder if gamifying it is enough but it’s a step.
Started modding Android ROMs at 13. That age is perfect; old enough to understand consequences, young enough to not care about breaking things.
Hardware hacking tools have gotten more accessible since then. The Flipper Zero makes this easier now; 256KB RAM, open firmware, $200. Compare that to needing a full PC setup in the 2000s. Lower barrier, same curiosity-driven learning.
Guided challenges vs pure exploration; both work. The structure gets more people started. The ones who stick around will break out of the sandbox anyway.
“El hambre agudiza el ingenio”, we say in Spanish. Hunger sharpens the mind.
Growing up with fewer resources than others paradoxically leads to better outcomes sometimes, since you’re conscious of the barriers around you and that motivates you to overcome them.
If I had grown up with the latest iPhone I would never have cared about rooting and custom ROMs, for example.
Early 90's were more fun. I modified DOS command.com file to change the outputs it prints, drilled holes into laptop to attach broken hinges, break electronic garbage to salvage wires and interesting things, disassemble disk drives, ...
Haha that reminds me, Qbasic using the help file to figure out how to program. Taking apart a HD and getting my fingers pinched between the two bloody strong magnets.
Amazing what you learn when you have no other distraction xD
I agree that the early 90's were a lot of fun – I remember drilling holes in 3.5-inch floppy disks to increase their capacity, blissfully unaware that actual HD floppies had a different coating entirely…
Two (of the many) mind-blowing discoveries of the 80's:
1. there was a disk notcher (the Nibbler?) that would DOUBLE the capacity of a 5 1/4 floppy!
2. you could just use a regular paper hole punch and a few select clips to do the same thing!
All my C64 floppies had faint parallel pencil lines across the top to line up the slots and what looked like mouse-nawed holes on one side.
I suspect gamifying it isn't enough, but as you say it's a step, and if it helps more people get involved then hopefully others can provide more steps to follow.
That era of breaking-and-fixing out of necessity was like the ultimate bootcamp
I don't think you can recreate this in any top-down manner no matter how well-intentioned.
It has to matter to them, and what's more, it gives you extra boost if you aren't supposed to do it and no parent or teacher pats you on the shoulder, but rather your friends or people in online forums like it, or simply you like it for yourself, seeing that the computer does what you want.
I learned computers by making a website for my school class, where we would put pictures from events and excursions, hosted a chat and a phpbb, designed the graphical elements in cracked warez Photoshop etc. This forced me to naturally pick up the skills. HTML, JS, burning ISO to CD, downloading things etc. Also warez games, learning about the Program Files difectory at like age 8 and how to copy the cracked exe there. Or setting up port forwarding for multi-player gaming.
Or when I modded GTA (3/VC/SA) with new car models that I built in 3D modeling software based on hunting down the orthographic projection blueprints of our family car, or adding the police vehicles from my country in GTA, messing with textures etc.
Or translating games from English, reverse engineering the binary file that contained the strings, I figures out that the length of each string was also there and I had to modify that too, learn about big endian and little endian, learn to work with a hex editor, understand what hex is. It was super exciting. If I had a lecture from some teacher about hex representation with some exercises at the end of the chapter for homework, I likely would have found it boring. But here I had context, I had a goal, and I had no idea what I was looking at when I opened the hex editor, I just saw that people used similar tools for translating other games and so I tried on less popular games where nobody had a specialized tool yet, it felt like making discoveries, going deep into the jungle and prevailing.
Now to contradict myself, I did have a lot of fun also while solving PythonChallenge.com, even though it's artificial tasks. But at least I found it myself online and wasn't handed to me and nobody knew or cared that I was working on it.
So I think this is just really hard to externally motivate if the kids don't have any desires or drive to see some effect caused by them. And maybe even I wouldn't do it in the current software and phone environment.
But we also have to remember that a generation ago it was also not many people who were really into computers.
I have found this while trying to teach my kids how to write anything software related from scratch. They've done some code.org, but it becomes boring quickly. We tried to make tic-tac-toe in js/html/css since they can do they whole thing in the browser. It held their attention slightly longer, but still became boring. It's not something they want to do.
I totally agree with you on learning for a purpose, picking up knowledge is super easy imo when you're in pursuit of a goal bigger than picking up knowledge. You don't even realize all of the things you learn in order to achieve your goal. But you have to want a goal.
I also totally agree sometimes it's fun to just do dumb problems, I found these CAD modeling youtube videos where guys will race each other modeling some part off of a print, spent a week just screwing around with those because it's fun to flex sometimes.
On the other hand if I'm honest, all this noodling around as a teen didn't give me a super robust foundation at all. I had a kind of folk understanding, or rough mental model of the things but it made me like it as a hobby and identify with it, which pushed me to take up CS in college.
It gave me some head start that I knew Python and JS when learning C, but not super much. Other students, who were smart but didn't fiddle with computers as much, generally picked these things up along the way, 4-5 years college is plenty time to develop the skills if you got the talent.
Also my understanding of networks was super shallow based on just multi player gaming and learning router settings, and I only really built a proper mental model in college with OSI model, TCP/IP details, reading the Tanenbaum book, doing socket programming etc.
So these generic tech and computer skills are in my opinion more about giving people a sense of agency, which is still quite something. That you put together your own PC, that you download your own subtitle files for the movies and figure out how to adjust the sync to match your version of the movie etc. It just gives you a feeling that you can do things. If something is wrong, you can, and therefore want to fix it. It's a different attitude compared to just accepting everything as it is.
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The supposed target of this game do not at all match who can actually play it. Kids don't have Macs. Those who want to hack don't have iPhones. I would even say that a kid with an iPhone will never get the necessary curiosity about computers to want to hack anything.
My son has been highly motivated to learn about hacking in his iPad to hack some of the games they play for school (blooket and prodigy). Those are web based games, true, but fiddling with the dev console, editing the dom, and finding and pasting scripts, is not nothing.
>> the dev console, editing the dom, and finding and pasting scripts, is not nothing.
this is awesome, but way easier on a cheaper, more accessible device.
I think it's fair to say that the most accessible device is the one they are already using.
This is categorically not true. Source: watched a bunch of people enter the jailbreak scene
I was with you up until the last statement which does not seem plausible at all. Curiosity about computers is not something you are born with.
Curiosity is not something you are born with, yes. It's influenced by the experiences you have. I don't think iPhones allow for the experiences that push kids to want to hack things. It is pretty much a sealed environment where all details about how the computer works is hidden behind some app. Even access to the filesystem (iirc from my 2014 experience) is hidden away (like being unable to access your picture files except through the gallery app). That kind of environment stiffles curiosity imo.
i think this is a terrible assumption to make. the computer or phone a kid gets from their parents has nothing to do with their curiosity, intelligence, interests or ambitions.
I am no hacker, but for me it was exactly this which made me go What?!
Why would people who want to hack not have iPhones?
Where would this sit between Over the Wire [0] and Hacknet [1]? I would try it but I don't own anything apple.
[0] https://overthewire.org/wargames/bandit/
[1] https://hacknet-os.com/
There's a web version at: https://www.hacktivate.io/
I don't believe you need Apple hardware for this.
However the blog post states "it’s not as powerful or as fun, but it’s entirely web-based and free". Not sure what is meant by "not as powerful"?
The native version does quite a few extra things, including bringing all the solving tools inside the app (as opposed to using external tools like CyberChef, Boxentriq, Dcode, etc), but also has more compute-intensive operations like creating spectrograms of audio and image manipulation, a much bigger implementation of the Linux terminal, and (safely!) destructive things too – you get local copies of files or databases to work with, so you can delete them, modify them, etc, freely, rather than being restricted to working with shared resources.
Such a great idea and product!
Thanks for all the hard work.
However, please get rid of micro-transactions...
I'm fine paying full price of the product for my kid, but not micro-transactions.
Just FYI: The App Store has an Education Edition which is the “same app but paid up front”.
There's a separate version of the app that is a one-time purchase, with zero in-app purchases. It's available here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...
>And if you’re dead set against Apple devices, you should check out the web version of Hacktivate – it’s not as powerful or as fun, but it’s entirely web-based and free!)
350+ schools are already using this, completely free, and I'm adding new schools every week!
I have not used the app but the developer Paul Hudson was the guy who taught me Swift and UIKit when I was in college and wanted to dig into iOS development for fun. He’s truly gifted when it comes to teaching.
Thank you for your kind words! I've spent over a decade teaching folks to build apps, and it's something I hope I can continue doing for a long time to come.
Nice.. But Damn.. Apple only : (
Yeah, sorry; I know my limitations, and would rather do one thing very well than two things kinda average.
You picked the least hacker-friendly platform ...
Huge respect for not just building a tool, but building an experience that demystifies hacking in a structured, ethical, and genuinely fun way
Thank you! I poured a lot of time and energy into making sure challenges are unique and interesting, but also graded so folks follow a cohesive pathway, and also feel fun – it's as close to a "Hollywood-hacker" aesthetic as I could get.
Nice, I am a fan of this idea and have been trying to figure out the right way to engage my niece in computers in a real way. One of my biggest concerns from seeing how it impacted my stepdaughter (now in college) is how kids are not learning how general purpose computers work and are becoming too comfortable existing entirely in restricted environments like iPads and Chromebooks. With my niece, I'm taking more active measures to ensure she learns how things actually work.
I bought the full version because I'm not a fan of in-app purchases in things marketed at children, and I'll give it a playthrough myself first to make sure it fits the bill. One of the upcoming projects we're going to do together is to build a mechanical keyboard. I'm also going to build a PC with her and try to teach her the basics so she can explore mostly uninhibited on Linux.
Thank you! I hope you enjoy using the app together.
Cool idea I was going to check it out but I don’t want to update my iPad to the latest OS for jailbreaky reasons. Any chance you could release support for something slightly before 18.5?
The app only uses one API from iOS 18 and later, so from a coding perspective I could make it support older versions easily. However, the bigger problem is testing: right now I test each release thoroughly on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, across iOS 18 and iOS 26, so adding another iOS version would require another set of devices and more time.
>how to do SQL injection, how to use rainbow tables to figure out hashes, how to use steganography to hide data in images, and more.
I feel like there are more practical and timeless topics that will still be relevant in 2040. Frameworks (abstraction) have largely solved SQL injection and bad cryptography.
Personally I would avoid a cybersecurity focused corriculum and just focus on regular software engineering. Being able to think like who you are attacking and knowing the common pitfalls is most of the battle.
Eh… I just went to Stack Overflow and searched for "php mysql", and the first result (https://stackoverflow.com/q/79790370) – asked 12 days ago – had SQL injection
This is part of the long tail. I think you are underestimating the role AI is going to be playing in 2040. ChatGPT can already solve that stack overflow question and make the code use the prepared statement correctly. AI will play a pivotal role in helping with the long tail of these issues.
If it's all the same to you, I'm going to focus on inspiring people with today's technology, and hopefully help fuel their curiosity to learn about what comes in the future – whatever that may be.
Yes, that is part of what my point is. To focus on today's technology rather than the technology of the 90s or 00s.
Then why are you talking about hypothetical technology from 2040?
This is why I like the Try Hack Me platform so much. You have a lot of walkthroughs and guided challenges to get started and learn the basics; challenges get harder and harder with less and less help. You also have access to challenge write-ups even if you did not complete them, meaning that if you're stuck, instead of losing motivation, you can make progress.
They embrace learning for all levels and helped me so much getting into infosec professionally.
Game for kids, where you dedicate a third of the screen to a locked hint list and a very prominent "Buy Hint Tokens" button? Hard pass.
https://www.hacktivate.app/img/framed-ipad-3.png
The game industry needs to move away from milking vulnerable people with pay-to-win schemes.
Also the game costs 20 bucks but it's offered as "Free" with "in app purchases". But you can only play one challenge until you need to buy the game. That's just false advertising. Just be upfront about it and sell the game for 20 bucks instead.
I'm not sure where you got the one challenge thing from – you can play 10 challenges without needing to pay a cent. Plus, there is a dedicated version you can buy up front front without any in-app purchases, right here: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...
I installed and played the game on my mac this morning. I tried several ways to get to another challenge I could play, but was unable.
The link I used is the one from your site.
All you have to do to unlock the next free challenge is solve the previous challenge. The first 10 tutorials are designed to teach the basics of the app – how to transform data with the toolbox, how to read web page source code and run JavaScript, basic Linux commands, etc – and so they are run in order. There are 10 in total, all free, plus another one in the first territory afterwards, which teaches the basics of ciphers.
So there's our misunderstanding. I skipped the tutorial, because I already saw your demo video. Then I clicked on the US on the map and played the first challenge called "Tutorial: Cipher salad". After that I always got the "Buy now" popup when I tried to play another challenge.
But you're right, the tutorial is playable too and it consists of the same kind of challenges, not just simple explanations how to play. So my initial statement was not correct.
I see. Well, I hope you can appreciate there are limits to what I can do – if someone skips the free challenges then is unhappy there aren't enough free challenges, I don't really know how I can fix that. If you want to go back to play the tutorial challenges, they remain available.
https://www.darkpattern.games/
https://nobsgames.stavros.io/
I've watched my grandma play a mobile game a few days ago. It has been a simple word search game. A level takes her about 2-3 minutes to beat. Every single time she beats a level, she is getting 1-2 30 second advertisements that she has to sit through. Its honestly so sad to see. Thankfully she knows that all mobile ads are bullshit and how to close them, but still... This market is shameless.
Nothing about Hacktivate is pay-to-win – you can solve every challenge without using a single hint, and even if someone does need hints there are a bunch given away for free. Even more, for people who want the game but don't want micro-transactions, there's a dedicated version of the game (https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/hacktivate-education-edition/i...) that is a one-time purchase with no in-app purchases at all.
Right, that's absolutely disgusting. The only reason that would be somewhat OK is if that's part of the game, and you can hack it to get tokens for free.
Do you also teach kids about jail time and/or being blackballed by the industry? Because no matter how well-intentioned you are I can see a 13 year old me doing the naughty thing.
No, but I like the idea – I think it might make for a good screen to add once they complete the game, saying "use your skills responsibly" and similar. Thank you!
Neat... Brings memories of the national cybersecurity courses you were talking about.
I never figured out how to do that "cat flag" terminal privilege escalation.
Those cybersecurity challenges are incredible – I see kids light up when they take part, finding a passion for something they didn't even known existed previously. I don't think the teams who organize them get enough recognition for their incredible work!
"teach kids to hack" "available for iPhone, iPad and Mac"
You need to understand your market better!
OP is Paul Hudson, creator of lots of Swift / SwiftUI tutorials and other resources.
https://www.hackingwithswift.com/
As an outsider, are you suggesting OP can make more sales on Android because that’s more hacker friendly? Or what exactly? From what I hear no one makes any money on apps outside the Apple ecosystem and big game platforms.
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guy thinks he is Mr. Robot? Hack computers jajajajaja people watched too many films