Category
Opinion
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04.12.13UK’s Office of Fair Trading to investigate children’s apps and IAPSeveral times in recent months we've expressed unease at children's apps including in-app purchase options as high as £69.99, while there have also been regular media reports about kids blowing their parents' iTunes accounts on virtual items. Now something's being done about it. The UK's Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has launched an investigation into freemium web and ap-based games for children, exploring whether their in-app practices are "misleading, commercially aggressive or otherwise unfair". "We are concerned that children and their parents could be subject to unfair pressure to purchase when they are playing games they thought were free, but which can ...
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01.04.13Apps Playground in December: 22.4k unique visitorsEvery so often, we like to publish some of our website stats, to show how Apps Playground is growing. We're very excited about December 2012, so here's another of those posts. Last month, the site attracted 22,357 unique visitors, which is up 49.3% on November's total. Most of this was healthy organic growth too: more people finding their way to the site's old and new stories. We had a nice spike when British MP Tom Watson kindly tweeted his recommendation of the site to his 109k followers just before Christmas, although that was then balanced out by a baffling plummet in our ...
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12.17.12Why we’re sometimes a bit slow to write about new apps2012 has been a really exciting year for children's apps, with dozens of excellent new examples released every month. But we have to admit, we're starting to be a little overwhelmed. Most days there are somewhere between three and eight new apps on the App Store that we'd like to write about. Yet for Alice and I – the co-founders of Apps Playground – this is something we do around our day jobs (market research and journalism respectively) and parenting our own two pint-sized apps testers. Continue Reading...
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12.14.12Playmobil Pirates and in-app purchases: Gameloft respondsYesterday, I wrote about a new iOS game called Playmobil Pirates, and expressed concern about the inclusion of an option to spend £69.99 via in-app purchase (IAP) on 15,000 virtual gems. It seemed a strange thing to include in a game clearly aimed at children, even if (hopefully) their parents would have in-app purchase settings locked down on their devices to ensure kids couldn't buy IAP without their knowledge. This is a sensitive debate, though, so it was only fair to ask the game's publisher Gameloft for its views. I chatted on the phone to UK spokesperson Lewis Digby about the use ...
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12.05.12Amazon launches Kindle FreeTime Unlimited for children. Your move, Apple…We know that lots of children are using their parents' tablets – mainly iPads – to play games, read stories and watch TV shows. Now Amazon has announced a new service called Kindle FreeTime Unlimited that pushes this idea on a bit. It's aimed at 3-8 year-olds, and for now is tied into Amazon's own Kindle Fire and Kindle Fire HD tablets. The idea: you as a parent pay a flat monthly subscription – $4.99 per child or $9.99 per family (yes, it's US-only at the moment) – to get unlimited access to a hand-picked selection of apps, games, TV shows ...
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12.04.12How Desperate Dan lost his lustre to Angry Birds and Talking Tom CatYou can't escape The Dandy today on the news here in the UK: the last printed issue of the 75 year-old comic has just been published, as it moves to being a digital-only product. From now on, you'll be able to get The Dandy from its website or, at some point, from mobile and tablet apps. So, characters like Desperate Dan, Keyhole Kate, Bananaman and the Numskulls will live on, but on screens rather than in print. "We all know how popular digital devices have become with children so we’re drawing on our traditional heritage and updating our product to make it ...
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12.03.12Apps Playground is growing with 17.3k unique monthly visitors in NovemberA few months ago we published a story about how Apps Playground was growing, after this site attracted 10,664 unique visitors in August. Now it's time for an update on that, because things have been going pretty well. In November, 17,324 unique visitors came to Apps Playground, generating 29,945 pageviews on the site. We were still recovering at the start of the month from an episode in October when the site plummeted down Google's search rankings for no apparent reason, too. If December carries on where November left off, we could be as high as 25,000 unique visitors in December. Continue Reading...
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10.23.12Apple iPad mini may be the best tablet for kidsTonight, Apple unveiled a brand new iPad tablet: the iPad mini. We think it will be a big hit for parents and their children, even more so than the existing iPads. Here's why... Tech specs first: the main thing you need to know is that the iPad mini is, well, mini. It has a 7.9-inch screen compared to the 9.7-inch screen of its bigger brother(s). Apple says the new device is 23% thinner and 53% lighter than the last iPad. Perfect for child-sized hands. The iPad mini will go for 10 hours at a time, runs the latest iOS 6 software, and ...
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09.03.12Apps Playground’s August records: 10k readers and 22k pageviewsWe're pretty chuffed about Apps Playground's growth in August 2012, so we thought we'd share it with you. The site saw new records in visitors and pageviews, as well as people actually clicking through to buy the apps we wrote about. The stats? We got 10,664 unique visitors in August, up 60% compared to July. Pageviews for the month totalled 22,243, up 61%. More than 2,800 people clicked through to the App Store from our stories over the month, which was another record. We're not naive: this is still a small audience in the wider webby scheme of things, and there are ...
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04.19.12How to stop your kids buying in-app purchases on your iPhone or iPadThere's a lot of media attention this week on in-app purchases within children's apps, due to a lawsuit in the US. We had our say in an opinion post earlier this week. One of the key problems is that many parents don't know how to use the iOS Restrictions settings to control what their children can and can't do on their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. So here's a quick and (hopefully) handy guide. The short version: go to Settings, tap on General, then Restrictions, set an unlock code, and then scroll down to the toggle for In-App Purchases, and turn it ...
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