Why some apps are harder to put down

You've been there. The game is over, time to put the phone down, and your kid acts like you've taken away something essential. It doesn't happen with every app. Some games end and the child moves on. Others seem to make the transition harder every time.

A 2025 study tested whether the app itself might be part of the problem.

The experiment

Tanya Mallawaarachchi and colleagues at Queensland University of Technology randomly assigned 73 children aged 3 to 5 to one of three apps with different levels of what researchers call "persuasive design": the features built to keep you using the product (Mallawaarachchi, 2025). Frequent reward animations, surprise prompts, requests for in-app purchases, progress bars that encourage "just one more."

Each child played with their assigned app for six minutes. Then the researchers asked them to stop.

What they found

Children with stronger self-regulation managed to disengage from all three app types without much difficulty. The design of the app didn't make a noticeable difference for them.

Children with lower self-regulation told a different story. They disengaged easily from the low-persuasive-design app. But when assigned to the apps with moderate or high levels of persuasive design, they took significantly longer to stop, needed more prompting from adults, and showed more resistance (Mallawaarachchi, 2025).

The researchers described this as a "first-of-its-kind" finding. The design elements that are standard in most commercial children's apps, the ones built to maximise engagement, made it specifically harder for the kids who already had the least capacity to self-regulate.

What persuasive design looks like

You don't need to read a research paper to spot it. Open the app and watch for a minute. If the game plays a reward animation every few seconds, if surprise bonuses appear unpredictably, if it prompts the child to "keep going" or "try again" immediately after finishing, those are persuasive design patterns.

Compare that to a game that ends when the story ends, pauses before offering replay, and doesn't flash rewards at every tap. The second version makes the parent's job easier because the design isn't working against the transition.

Look at the app before you look at the kid

When screen-off time turns into a battle, the instinct is to wonder what's going on with the child. Sometimes the more useful question is what's going on with the app.

A game designed to make stopping easy looks different from one designed to make stopping hard. Both exist. The difference shows up at the moment you say "time to finish."

For more on building transitions that work, see how to end screen time without a meltdown. For the design principles behind games that know when to stop, see games that know when to stop.