Web View Controller or Not

Something that I was thinking about yesterday, was whether to have links to contact, support, privacy policy and some such, open within a web view in the app. or hand off to safari. It’s simple to implement either, and I’m not concerned with people leaving the app, so it’s only a matter of what is best for the apps users.

The complication is that the app is designed for children, while the customers are parents. How do parents feel about opening a browser vs. an embedded view of web content? I can’t find any best practices.

These elements are often buried deep within the information structure of many apps and you often have to work hard to find these standard contact, support, privacy policy and “marketing” uri. I suspect for many this is as much an afterthought as you see on the web. But while I suspect that very few will bother with the feature, I do want to support those who feel the need to reach out with their complaints, concerns, and feedback.

Some apps I have seen add some kind of heavy handed “gotcha” type test to filter out younger users, but the experience is sub-optimal and kids are generally smart enough to subvert most of these types of controls anyway. What I decided to do, at least until I can gain some feedback from future tests, is to simply hand off to safari with the belief that if access to the web is a concern to parents that they will have set up controls on the phone, or at least monitor their children’s usage.


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