The app-driven life: How smartphone apps are changing our lives

When he was 6 months old, his parents read him the iPad versions of Dr. Seuss books. At 9 months, Beckett figured out how to slide his little finger across an iPhone, unlocking the device all on his own. After a year, he realized the phone was snapping photos of him, and started posing when his parents held up the device. By 18 months, Beckett talked to his grand-parents using Apple's FaceTime video chat, kissing the screen to say goodbye.

Smart phones and tablets "have just been such a part of his life that it's hard to imagine him knowing anything else," says Mr. Nathanson. "Like in the case of his grandparents, he knows that they're not there, but the screen is not a barrier for interacting with them."

Nathanson understands that screen time is no substitute for parenting. He and his wife have made sure to read Beckett paper books, buy him physical toys, and not to leave him with an iPhone unattended. Perhaps because of this sensitivity, Nathanson seems rather charmed by a recent shift in his son.

"At this point, he'd rather play with his train set than with the iPad," he says. Beckett still wants his dad to find videos of cars and trains on YouTube, but when it comes to playtime, toys win, hands down.

After hearing Beckett's story, child-development expert Nancy Darling lets out a cheer, but says that she's not really surprised by his new fascination. At that age, kids are very sensory oriented. They want reactions, smells, splashes, and clangs. Tablets and smart phones offer interactions, but only in a very limited way.

Because of this, the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that kids under the age of 2 not get any screen time. This includes iPads, but Ms. Darling points out that the underlying research focuses on television, not tablets. Tablets are simply too new for studies to come down on one side or the other, says Darling, a psychology professor at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio.

From her perspective, a tablet is more responsive than a TV or a book, "but it's nowhere near as interactive as a cat, or a ball falling down the stairs, or a mud puddle," she says.

Lawless app ecosystems?

When Beckett was born, Nathanson left his tech-industry job in San Francisco and moved across the country to Somerville, Mass., just north of Boston. Looking for a new project and perhaps a new career, he decided to teach himself how to program iPhone apps.

Nathanson was very involved in coding back at his old job, but knew little about Apple's programming language. As he dug in, Nathanson was surprised by how much control Apple had over the process – both directly and indirectly. He knew that Apple reviewed apps before they went online, but he didn't expect the company to foster a large library of half-finished code like little starter kits that give programmers a basic design but allow them to fill in the specifics and add in their own graphics.

This does more than ease the process for beginners, he says. It nudges developers to adopt Apple's vision of how apps should look and feel.

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