What to check before installing a kids app

Both stores put the answers on the listing page, before you install: Google Play shows a Contains ads label under the install button and an In-app purchases price range, and the App Store lists In-App Purchases with prices on the product page. Neither tells you how often an ad appears or how aggressive the purchase flow is, which is why the six checks below take about ninety seconds and are worth doing.

We fill these disclosures out for our own kids apps, so what follows is a description of forms we have submitted rather than a guess about them.

The ninety-second check

What each disclosure does not cover

“Contains ads” has no volume dial. An app with a small banner and an app that plays a thirty-second unskippable video between every level carry the same label. The label is a yes/no for the presence of an ad SDK.

The purchase range is not the monetization design. Two apps can both say $0.99 – $9.99 and behave completely differently: one sells a single unlock at $2.99, the other sells nine tiers of currency to a child who has run out of lives. The range is a ceiling, not a shape.

Data safety is a self-declaration. Developers fill in a form, the store publishes it, and enforcement is by spot check and complaint. That is not worthless, since a false declaration is a policy violation with real consequences, but it is a claim somebody signed rather than an audit somebody performed.

The parental gate, and why its details matter

Apple’s App Review Guideline 1.3 requires apps aimed at children to put “a task not easily completed by a young child” in front of purchases and links out of the app. That is a low bar written loosely, and the gap between meeting it and meeting it well is most of the difference between the good kids apps and the rest.

Three details are worth noticing when you open one yourself.

What the gate protects. The purchase flow is the obvious one. The less obvious ones are external links — support email, the privacy policy, the developer’s other apps on the store — the “rate this app” prompt, and any control that changes a privacy setting. An app that gates only the shop has left a child a route to the store listing and to a review box.

Whether it can be brute-forced. A gate that asks the same question until you get it right is a gate that a determined seven-year-old passes by trying. The version that holds up generates a fresh problem after a wrong answer, and asks something arithmetic rather than something you read — two-digit, multi-operand mental arithmetic works at any reading level and in any language.

Whether it remembers. This is the one almost nobody checks. A gate with a “remember me” is a gate that ran once, on a phone that then changed hands. In our own apps a pass covers one visit to one surface and nothing is persisted: back out and return and it asks again, and sending the app to the background — the moment the phone is actually handed over — drops the adult screens off the stack so a resume lands the child back where they were.

If you want to test one in ten seconds: open the parental gate, answer it wrongly on purpose, and see whether you get a new question or the same one.

What “no ads” should mean

There is a version of ad-free that survives inspection, and a version that does not.

The weak version is “no ads today”. The app ships with no ad SDK bundled, ads arrive in version 2.4, and nothing in the listing ever said otherwise.

The strong version is there is no ad code in the app at all. It is verifiable indirectly: an app with no advertising SDK usually declares no advertising ID in its data disclosure, and it usually cannot be free-with-a-huge-purchase-range, because there is no revenue model left to explain the free tier.

The same reasoning applies to purchases. “Nothing to buy inside” is a much stronger statement than “no ads”, because it means the app cannot be quietly converted into a shop later without a paid update.

How our kids apps answer these

Because a checklist written by someone selling apps is worth checking against those apps.

• Match & Spot — paid up front, and there is no billing code in the app at all. Nothing inside it can be bought, so no purchase flow exists for a child to find. Fully offline.
• Sudoku Junior — free to try, one family unlock at a single price, no ads, fully offline. The unlock sits behind a parental gate.
• Spell & Collect — no ads, pack unlocks rather than currency, and it plays offline once a pack has been downloaded.
• Robot Programmer — free, no ads, nothing to buy, fully offline. It asks for no permissions at all: no notifications, no camera, no microphone, no contacts, no location, and no advertising identifier, so there is no iOS tracking prompt for a child to tap through.

None of them shows an ad. That is not true of everything we make: several of our puzzle games for adults run banners and interstitials, which their cards say plainly. We hold the kids apps to a different line because a six-year-old cannot evaluate an ad, so there is nothing for them to consent to.

Where to go from here

If the concern is what happens on a plane or in a tunnel, “offline” is a word with three different meanings on a store listing — offline games for kids separates them. If the concern is the money rather than the ads, what a puzzle game subscription costs does the arithmetic. And every kids app we make is on the Kids page, each card carrying its ad behaviour and its price before you tap anything.