We at Chivo have seen an emergence of application development toolkits over the past few years that are designed with the core premise of expediting the application development process beyond that of what the traditional mobile OS SDK was previously able to provide. While we are excited to see the barrier to app production grow lower and lower with each passing year, we have observed a trend of applications being released, we have also observed a trend of apps which we believe to be "anti-user" in their nature, that only exist to farm user behavior and attention, while also providing little or no value to the user who is actively using the system.

The Problem

The crux of the issue around these types of applications are rooted in a failure of proper consumer education, as while as a failure on the part of the application developer to abide by basic principles of ethical computing. We at Chivo Systems believe this to be a serious problem. We frequently tell our clients the following pieces of information:

1. If an application is free, but not open source, it is generally because you are product, not the customer. (In other words, the app is farming your information and behaviors)
2. Many applications use carefully crafted algorithms to siphon large amounts of user attention and keep them retained in the platform, with feedback loops.

While we support the idea of free applications, we believe that user privacy is extremely important, and we also believe that applications should not make use of attention grabbing loops that prioritize retention over user health. We have an obligation to build the highest quality, and healthiest apps for our customers, clients, and users.

Our Philosophy

Our philosophy around development especially within mobile applications rests in a few key points that we believe to be crucial for the construction of a quality, safe, and healthy app.

1. Good engineering: We believe that for app to be safe and ethical, it must be well engineered and well maintained. That means security updates, and best practices for security and dependency management used during the app's construction so that any data that the user provides is at the safest possible degree of storage.
2. Avoidance of excessive data collection: We believe that an application should collect the required data to improve user experience within the app, but not collect data to an excessive degree.
3. Explicit user consent on all data collected: We believe that a user should know what data they are providing to an app or platform, in clear and plain language. Hiding aggressive privacy policies behind a mountain of verbiage that a user will likely never read is unethical, and we do not engage in such behaviors, and never will.
4. Safe handling of all user data: we believe that user data should be handled with extreme respect and care, if a user entrusts an app with their data, regardless of data type, it is important that best practices are always used during the handling of that data.

These four guiding principles, are the core of our philosophy on Application Development. They are the pillars of how we build the "Systems" of Chivo Systems. They are something that every member of our Application Development and Engineering team reads during orientation, and they are something that we constantly refer back to when making important decisions. We firmly believe that the world would be a better place, if others did the same, and that is why we post our core Ethical Computing Philosophy for all to read.