ANSWER - OR ELSE

App shuts down phones 'til kids respond

A new cellphone app is about to become Public Enemy #1 among sullen teenagers everywhere.

Dubbed ReplyASAP, the app puts a powerful new weapon into the arsenal of helicopter parents, giving them the ability to instantly shut down their kids’ phones if the youngsters don’t call them back quickly enough.

The program obstructs the recipient’s phone and sets off an alarm until a text or call is returned — even if the person’s cell is on silent mode.

It also notifies app users when the recipient has seen the incoming message, so parents will know if their kids haven’t spotted the alert or are just ignoring them.

The new way for parents to reach out to their rebellious kids was invented by Nick Herbert, a British product manager who said he came up with the idea after getting tired of being unable to reach his own son.

“My son has [a smartphone], but I still can’t get hold of him very easily as it’s always on silent because he is planning games or has been at school and forgotten to turn the sound back on,” Herbert told Goodhousekeeping.com of his 13-yearold son, Ben, in an interview published this week.

“There didn’t seem to be a solution out there that allowed me to send a message to him, that would override the silent function, appear over whatever he was doing and tell me when he had seen it,” Herbert said.

Herbert decided to create the app over “frustrations with current messaging apps,” he wrote on the Web site for ReplyASAP.

“There are messaging apps that tell you when a message is delivered and seen, but the point is the message can be ignored or not seen because he didn’t hear it,” he pointed out.

Herbert, 45, claims his son eventually came to grips with the intrusive app.

“It gives him the freedom to keep his phone on silent, but with the knowledge that I can get a message to him if necessary,” Herbert told Goodhousekeeping.com.

Herbert says that ReplyASAP also has “grown up” uses. It can be used to contact elderly family members or co-workers in an emergency or even to find a phone that has been lost.

ReplyASAP is currently available for Android and will soon be available on iOS.

So far, the app has been downloaded about 7,000 times. It costs 99 cents to download and comes with one free connection to another person. Adding a second number to message has a $1.27 fee.