Father Nick Herbert from the UK decided to buy his son a smartphone to stay connected, however, he quickly found out that the phone was going to do quite the opposite. Instead of reaching out to his father more, he instead ghosted his father quite often.
That’s when the father decided to solve the problem by creating an app, which he aptly named RespondASAP.
Instead of reaching out to his father more, his son would get hung up playing games, watching videos, and keeping his phone on silent, which made him miss calls and texts from his father. Aside from that, when he was with friends, he would overlook his father’s calls. To Nick, this became a frustrating nuisance, which nearly pushed him to take away the phone altogether.
However, instead of getting rid of his son’s phone, he took action. With his app, which he named RespondASAP, he was able to completely block every other function on the phone until his son responded to him. On top of blocking functions, Herbert was also able to find the location of his son, to keep tabs on him.
When he explained the app and its functions to his son, his son agreed that it seemed like a good idea.
Not only does the app work to help parents to communicate with their kids in the case of an emergency, but it also can be used the opposite way, helping a child to communicate an emergency to their parent. Additionally, Nick says it can be used with elderly relatives and even for coworkers.
His app was met with hesitations from users saying that it could easily be used to control a partner, or for other nefarious reasons. Nick’s response to this was that both parties had to agree to the download and installation for the app to function properly.
Currently, the app is available for download on both the play store on Google and the app store on Apple. What do you think? Is it a step too far, or is it an amazing idea?