I thought Shapr3D would be a great introduction to CAD for my daughter as it’s advanced but intuitive. Unfortunately she’s 10 years old and the app is rated 17+. I get it’s no toy but I was tinkering with & being taught CAD in secondary school so why is there such an age restriction? Why not 7/8+?
Well I haven’t run into any disturbing abstract ideas in Shapr. Even the forum is mild… maybe that is just a guideline so parents don’t buy expecting it to be easy for any age?
I wouldn’t worry about it. Just let her go to it.
I mean nobody has shared an adult toy design here have they? … maybe I better check first…
We use it at The Discovery Cube, in Orange County, Ca. as an educational program. We were using TinkerCad, but we lived to Shapr3D.
Since Shapr3D has an internal browser module, users can use that to reach sites like YouTube from there and can access 17+ content from the internet.
While we think it is vital that our users’ need to have the ability to access our forum through the app, we won’t control what they are using the browser module for, hence the higher age rating.
But we already control her web content via parental controls. Those same controls which mean she can’t download the App. iPadOS has this covered.
The irony is that you’d have to turn off iPad protections for younger kids to use it. Leaving them exposed to the very content of concern.
We often meet our fate on the path we take to avoid it.
Unfortunately this was a requirement from the App Store review team. We’d be glad to remove this limitation if we could.
That’s unfortunate policy. Couldn’t the forum/collaboration functionality be restricted in accordance with parental controls/user age? I’m sure they let games work that way.
I get it’s a pain but kids deserve this product & I think it would be an excellent market for you guys.
Yes, I totally agree. We haven’t taken a look at this for a while, maybe there are some changes in the policies since the last time we checked. Thanks for bringing this up, we’ll take a look.
I am another vote for this. I have 2 kids homeschooling and I was going to teach them how to draw up toys and tools then send them to the 3D printer on their iPad’s but they have a 4+ app age restriction. I was not wanting to up it to 17+ because they are not allowed to play Minecraft at the moment. I cannot restrict specific apps, kind of an all or nothing thing apparently. Thanks for looking into this. I have not found another app worth using. I am only using the free version as a hobbyist at the moment.
This is a quite unfortunate App Store limitations. Some of our tutorials are included in the app over YouTube, and the App Store review team decided that this should make us set an age limit on the app.
I believe you should revisit this with Apple. If Youtube is the concern, Youtube only has an age rating of 12+ in the Appstore. Which means Shapr3D could be reduced to 12+ to match. That would greatly increase the satisfaction of parents and faculty that want to give their teens/preteens access to the Shapr3D app without having to lift all the restrictions to 17+. I think if you were to do this your adoption rate for children using it would be exponential. And to be honest, this sets them up for future users of the product when they become adults and can help further shape industry adoption. Just my thoughts on it as my 12 year old is really wanting to advance past Tinkercad and I’d rather him move onto learn Shapr3D than Fusion360.