✅ Potty Genius [NaNoWriMo 2022]

Thirty-Four

¿Did Britney need to hypnotise you too?

No. In fact, her solution didn't even involve me. But even when she explained it, I took a few seconds to properly understand.

"The Potty Genius app is synchronised to your app store account, isn't it?" she asked. "So it automatically updates on your other devices."

"Yeah. I was using it on this tablet, and then it installed on my phone as well."

"So that means it's tied to your account. But when you first got the tablet, there were three kids on it. Right? Three accounts on one device. The opposite of a person with multiple devices, but it seems to work well."

"Yeah. It showed the three names at the top of the window, so you can choose who's using it right now. But they were all greyed out, because their accounts weren't on the phone anymore."

"Ohhh!" Theo gasped, eyes wide as she finally understood. "You can sign in on the tablet with two accounts, can't you?"

"Exactly!"

"How does that help?" I asked, maybe needing a little help to make the last leap of logic.

"You thought about uninstalling the app, didn't you? So it can't give you these surprise notifications anymore."

"Yeah. But I couldn't, because the hypnosis thing means I can't pee without the app to help. Is there some way around that? Like, if you could make me able to pee again it would be safe to remove it, but..."

"How about," Britney said, and hesitated before continuing. "How about if you remove the app. Then create a new app store account. A child account, like you're letting your kids use their own apps on your tablet. And then you set up Potty Genius for the child account. It will probably want to hypnotise you again, starting from scratch, right? Because you're starting from scratch. As far as Potty Genius knows, you're a completely new person. It doesn't seem it has any checks for the account root tag. It basically lets you start over. But this time you know not to tick the box that gives you a punishment for missed challenges. You could set it to easy mode, and play through it without any risk of timers going off when you don't expect them. I mean, it seems like the app is pretty good at tricking your brain into following instructions. Tampering with the programming in your head is hard, but the app itself is just as easily tricked as any first-year programming project."

I just stared. I couldn't believe that there was such a simple solution, and that I hadn't even thought about it. I should have known, because I'd seen that all of Uncle Stefan's kids had their own profiles on Potty Genius. And all of those accounts weren't accessible because they were no longer registered on the device. But I couldn't believe that it would be so easy to get around it, after the number of tricks that had been built into the app.

"But won't it..." I started. "I mean, if it's installed on the tablet, won't it just keep on using the same programming as before?"

"No. The app store lets you choose which profiles have access to a given app. Like, you wouldn't let your kids use a pay-per-view sports app, and stuff like that. But the same functionality works in reverse: an app can only access the profile data for the users who have specifically chosen to use it. That's what I had to research. I got it on my phone, and on my old phone that's been sitting in a drawer here without being used. I wanted to test the relationship between apps, users, and devices. I tried installing it a couple of times. I didn't go through the whole hypnotic induction thing, of course. It could tell that I wasn't paying enough attention to the terms and conditions, even if I tried it. But I'm like ninety-nine percent sure that it'll work like we want. Every test I tried did what I hoped it would."