What kinds of online content would be allowed under the app review guidelines?

Hi, I'm interested in developing an app that could browse Wikipedia. However it is my understanding that such an app wouldn't be allowed, as Wikipedia includes inappropriate content. While the content is educational, it can be very explicit.

Would the app be allowed if it was a MediaWiki (the software that Wikipedia uses) browser, and the user would have to enter the url of Wikipedia (or any other MediaWiki server) into the app? This way the user would be directing the app to Wikipedia, and the app wouldn't include or link to Wikipedia by default. If so, how would I be able to market this on connect iq? would I have to avoid mention of wikipedia.

This would also be an issue if I were to develop an email app with Gmail's rest api. Users can send me unmoderated content, however if I developed the app it would be tied to Gmail, so I wouldn't be able to distance the app from a specific platform.

  • This is an interesting question. Slight smile

    Since Wikipedia has its own terms of use (see https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use/en, particularly section 4) and it aligns with our own guidelines, an app of this nature would be allowed. I'd refer you back to Wikipedia's terms of use to seek an answer about marketing the app & using the Wikipedia name.

  • Thanks! My biggest concerns are section g, and section a.

    Section g says that user generated content must be moderated by me, and section a says that I can’t link to, or include […] any content relating to bestiality or non-consensual sex, or explicit descriptions or displays or sexual organs or activities.

    Wikipedia does has articles talking about all of those, and it has descriptions of sexual organs.

    The other thing to consider is the music apps. While Spotify does moderate their platform, and I’m not totally sure what their tos are, I believe they do have content that would break these rules. Also SubMusic allows you to link to your own music server.

    I think I’ll continue the project as a media wiki browser, with a mention of Wikipedia in the description so people can find it.

    Also to anyone who wants the mediawiki app: don’t expect it too soon because I only just got familiar with monkeyc and toybox.

  • I guess your question was more legal than practical  but what would be the use case of such an app? It would need the phone to be connected to the watch to be able to reach the internet, and if I already have the phone with me then why would I read wikipedia on the watch, when it's hardly readable on the phone? Not to talk about entering a url... have you ever copied an activity and renamed it? It's very slow even for such a thing that you do once and use for years, but to type in urls (or even search phrases) again and again... that would not be very useful IMHO.

  • You are going to run into some technical things, like the size and format of the data you get,  Will you keep getting "network response too large" errors. and will what you get something you can easily display with CIQ,

    Another one, is how will the user will enter a string in the app?  The Generic Picker?

  • I don’t see it being incredibly useful, but people might use it once in a while.

    A lot of the garmins have wifi, and I think two have lte, so you don’t necessarily need a phone. A page could also be downloaded to the watch and stored.

    And yeah, typing search queries or url’s would be tedious, but oh well. It’s a bit more bearable with the 3x3 keyboard.

    And, I’m not necessarily going for max usefulness, I just got my first garmin watch a couple months ago and I feel like this could advance my skills

  • Oh that’s not good. I do want to make this project so it might mean I would make my own server to break the requests up. At that point it would only be a personal project though.

    The whole project is mostly for my practice but if I can make something other people want to use, why not.

    yeah it would be the generic picker.

  • Try writing something with the genic picker that handles a string that's 30 characters or less.

    Then try a canned makeWebRequest, where you can request data and  the display it. 

    This will not be a simple app to write, and won't be as clean as just pulling out your phone and using that.  Your phone has to be right there to do a makeWebRequest anyways

  • I honestly don’t care if it’s impractical, or even if it doesn’t work at all. At the end of the day, I’ll have learned more about making apps for ciq. 

    I’ve already learned how to make a web request, and I’ve learned how to display the contents, and I’ve even learned how to make the text scrollable.

  • You may want to spend time with the samples in the SDK.  Not sure what you'll learn by attempting his app, as I see basic issues in getting anything to work

  • And remember about 2 things:

    1. Limits of data returning by server (of remember is about 8kb)

    2. Format of returning data - plain or json.

    So to handle Wikipedia pages you will need probably develop own proxy to pack data and convert it to proper format.