Hey, Your App Sucks

It’s every parent’s nightmare. Your child is missing — and you can’t remember their name.

Somewhere, McGruff the Crime Dog is taking a bite out of his PR team for not coming up with their own app.

Anyone can tell you that it is important to be able to share vital information about your children with law enforcement in the rare event that they are kidnapped by someone outside the family, or the slightly more likely event that they wander off and get lost. Somehow, like all tasks completed by humans, sharing this information has been turned into an iPhone app.

"Ma'am, we need more information about your 4-year-old son's tattoo. You say it's a picture of the Devil. OK, but what is he doing? Laughing at sinners, sneering in the face of God, riding a Harley-Davidson through the fiery gates of hell? Please be specific."

The only attributes this app includes that any parent does not know immediately off the top of their head is height and weight. However, I submit to you that a parent who updates their iPhone app every month with how much Junior weighs and how tall he is is a parent who therefore knows off the top of their head how much Junior weighs, and how tall he is, and thus renders this app useless.

This image is from the actual page in the App Store. How am I supposed to take seriously an app that purports to help parents recover their kidnapped children when the sample images include jokey references to characters from an animated TV show?

(In case you’re confused by that caption, you might check the official bio of The Simpsons character Sideshow Bob for more information.)

What this app really does is create a layer of redundancy disguised as due diligence. Do you really need an iPhone app to keep track of your son’s name, or your daughter’s hair color? And do you really think that you’re going to use this app to e-mail this information to the cops when your kid disappears — and then not call the cops to talk to someone in person? “Put down that phone, honey — I’ve already alerted the authorities via the KidStatz app.”

No. I think it’s more likely that, if you are a panicky parent whose baby just pulled a Keyser Söze disappearing act on you, you are going to be speaking with Sgt. Excessive Force in person to make sure they know exactly how important it is that Baby William comes home in one piece. You are not going to be sending a notice via iPhone app and kicking back with a mint julep in one hand and the TV remote in the other, flipping through old episodes of Everyday Italian. No, I think not.

"Officer, I'd like to report my gray-haired fetus missing. He's easily identified by his two pirate eye patches."