Apple's new Kids Section parental control issue [closed] - ios

Question

Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
This question does not appear to be about programming within the scope defined in the help center.
Closed 9 years ago.
Improve this question
I am updating my kids app for compliance to Apple's new Kids section. I have read the updated Review Guidelines. And it says :
Apps primarily intended for use by kids under 13 must get parental
permission or use a parental gate before allowing the user to link out
of the app or engage in commerce
Does anybody have any idea about what kind of action to take? How can we get parental permission or use a parental gate? Besides I am linking out just to apps iTunes page and our social pages, so do I need to take any action?
Thank you for your time.

Answer 1

I thumbed through the FAQ and the iTunes Connect Developer Guide myself and Apple certainly doesn't make it clear what "must get parental permission" means, but I suspect what this means is that the App Store will require some kind of extra authentication steps in order to do commerce (i.e. in-app purchases) or go somewhere outside of the app (e.g. with a UIWebView).
Which seems to be make sense because of this statement: "must get parental permission or use a parental gate before allowing the user to link out of the app or engage in commerce".

Answer 2

I looked through this topic on the Apple developer forums, where someone suggested the following for in-app purchases:
if ([SKPaymentQueue canMakePayments]) {
// user can make purchases
} else {
// no purchases can be made, show error or just don't show the in app purchase button(s)
}
If there is a way to determine if in-app purchases have been enabled on the device, is there a way to determine if Safari has been enabled?
Also, this article mentions PINs that must be entered before links can be opened, as well as requiring a three-finger swipe for in-app purchases / parents' sections.
These options may be worth a try, but I don't know if they will be enough.

Answer 3

I was wondering the same thing, as I'm not entirely sure if this is under NDA I asked this question on the apple developer forums, but no reply there either.
As far as I know there is no "set of API's" which define parental permission / parental gate, so the requirements are very vague indeed.
I fear we'll just have to try things and submit for approval, and find out in blogposts of various developers (and answers here on stackoverflow) what gets you rejected and what not, I hope I'm wrong and they clear this out though.
Anyway, I just updated one of our apps and checked the "Made for kids", it's in "waiting for review" now, if anything out of the ordinary happens I'll keep you posted.

Answer 4

As I have mentioned before, I had uploaded an update (keeping the outgoing links to social pages and to App Store for app rating via an UIAlertView) and the update is rejected as well.
At Resolution Center, it was mentioned clearly that because these outgoing links were not passing through a Parental Gate my app was rejected, and two screenshots were attached which show the buttons and UIAlertView leading out off the app. So don't forget to check the Resolution Center.
I have removed all out-going links and uploading the app again. I will keep here updated.
And the Parental Gate thing. I think I have found out how it will be working. Apple leaves this completely to developers. We will have to be using API's or SDK's of Parental Gate providers or services. With the help of such API's we will pass the urls to these parental gate services via their API's, and they will approve or reject the link (by checking their database) or they will require a parent's input, and possibly they will return a true/false flag, or let the user continue to the link.
For instance, a parental gate service is working on such thing :
http://parentalgate.com/parental-gate-ios-sdk/
My update with out-going links removed is approved. It took 20 minutes to get reviewed after waiting for review for 8 days.