I have helped IBT Russia to publish a nice Children’s Bible app in Russian. It has more than 200 stories with nice images and is not just useful for kids but basically for all age groups to learn about the Bible. The problem I ran into is with Apple. Because the app was named “Children’s Bible” in the beginning, I had to select the “Made for Kids” category. This is where the problems started. Apple requires a parental gate for such apps which basically means that a parent should be required to enter a code or something if there are any links in the app that enable the child to access other content/open other apps from inside the app. So I had to remove all links from the About Text, for example email and website. Also, we weren’t able to add links to the full Bible text (on the IBT website) below each story, which we did in the Android app. This way we were eventually able to publish the app.
Now we wanted the users to be able to use the annotation features at least. So we added (hidden) verse markers to the stories so people can mark and highlight sections of the text. When we tried to update the app in App Store connect, again we ran into lots of problems. Anything in the app that triggers the iOS sharing screen is a problem! Longpressing the text to copy it needed to be turned off. Sharing the App Store link with other users isn’t possible. Now it even turns out that we can’t have Bookmarks, Highlights and Notes in the app - guess why. Because they can be shared.
@richard @ChrisHubbard @david_moore1 Could we make a change in SAB so that we can keep the annotations but disable the sharing of them? Or alternatively, is there a way to add a parental gate function so that children wouldn’t be able to share things/click links but adults can?
So I missed being able to share from the annotations. I eliminated the sharing of the contents and the about box. I thought everything was off except the part that’s controlled by the options. I’ll make sure it is also turned off for the annotations stuff.
Thanks @david_moore1 but so far in SAB there is no option like that. Would you add one? Because you don’t want to turn it off for everybody.
Well, for copying from Content and about, I didn’t see any issue just not copying. I’m not sure I see an issue about not copying from the annotations pages either really. What I may do for iOS is put something in to not allowing copying from annotations for now (because we are planning on doing a new release very soon) and then look into making it optional and discussing it with Richard as an option for the next release.
No, it isn’t about copying from these pages, although yes, we should turn this off (I didn’t even think of that). These features have a sharing option near the top of the screen. This needs to be turned off too, or at least we would need an option in SAB to turn it off.
OK, with the annotations, there is also the share button besides the long press stuff, so you would need an option for that. I’ll look into it.
I have submitted PR https://github.com/sillsdev/app-builders/pull/1834 to allow the user to select whether annotations are allowed from the Engagement/Annotations tab. By default, annotations are shareable.
That’s great, thank you so much!