Moms With Apps Helps Parents Choose the Best Apps for their Children

 

What is Moms With Apps?

Kids love apps. But parents know that not all apps are created equal.  Nothing is worse than downloading an app only to find that it is not a quality story or game.  With more than one million apps to choose from, it can be hard to find the right apps for their family – and even harder to know if the app their kid loves is one they can trust.

Enter Moms With Apps, a first-of-its-kind destination that gives parents the power to choose the best apps for their kids.

Founded by parents who love using technology with their own kids, Moms With Apps only features developers who have committed to high standards for protecting kids’ privacy and building great family-friendly apps – and Moms With Apps always makes it quick and easy to Know What’s Inside every app they feature so that parents can decide if it’s right for their kids.  I had a chance to be a part of a group of tech mom bloggers that had the opportunity to speak to Sarah Kloek, Director, Moms with Apps Lorraine Ackemann and Susy Christensen, Moms and Developers, Moms with Apps last week to learn more about this great resource for busy parents.

Just like nutrition labels help parents decide which snack is right for their kids, Moms With Apps provides parents with information – in plain English – to help them decide which app is right for their kids.  There are so many great features that help parents decide which apps they want to download for their children.  Once of my favorite features is the ability to search through their list of apps by Subject and Age.  This specific Search feature is something not available on iTunes.  For example, if you are searching for ghost apps on iTunes, all the apps associated or featuring ghosts will come up.  However, you will find that most of them are for adults.  You then have to look through each app description to see if it is appropriate for children and even then you are aren’t sure if there are In-App purchases or other links that just need to be clicked to purchase other items.  These In-App purchases can be quite expensive if you aren’t careful.  A couple years ago, my daughter was playing a game that offered In-App Purchases to buy more gold coins.  In the end, she accidentally purchased over a $1,000 of these “gold coins” which luckily we were able to get cleared off our bill (which took some discussion with the iTunes store).

Know What’s Inside:

With the Moms With Apps resource, you not only can see What’s Inside the app, but what ages it is best suited for. Moms with Apps currently has 285 developers in its community and 885 apps in the discovery center.  The majority of apps were created by Indie App Developers who decided to create quality apps because they saw a need or were inspired by their children to create apps.  Like in my situation, it was my daughter who inspired me to create my first storybook app and children’s book, Penelope the Purple Pirate.  I thought it was important to showcase and create a female character who loves to have adventures – much like a modern-day Pippi Longstocking.  We have a lot of pretty and pink princess stories but not as many strong female role models featured in children’s storybook apps.  I even wrote a post for Moms With Apps a few years back about my experience of becoming a children’s picture and storybook app author by taking a rather nontraditional route.  I really am so happy to be working with this great group of moms (and dads) that showcase quality apps for busy parents to explore to see what might be a good purchase for their child.

The Moms With Apps website does three things:

 

1.  Helps you find the rights apps for your children. All of these apps are meet a set of design and development guidelines, including the following:

 

2. Know what’s inside the app before downloading!

 

 

3.  Search for apps based on these specific requirements:

 

 

 

3. Meet the developers behind the app. Find out what inspires them and share your feedback about their app with them!

Meet the Developers:

If you love a developer’s app, you can search for more by them under the developer’s page:

 

 

We had a chance to interview the Moms with Apps founders and Director and asked them some questions about the organization and what parent’s can expect when downloading a Moms With Apps Know What’s Inside-approved app!

 

Do you think there is one feature of Moms with Apps that rises above the rest in terms of importance?

 

The ability to search by the features that you want is important. For example, if you are going on a long road trip and you know won’t have Internet connectivity the entire time, and you want to find an app that can be used without Internet connectivity and that will also teach your child shapes, you can find that at MomsWithApps.com. You can’t find that anywhere else!

 

Beyond that, you know exactly what you’re getting when you download an app. You know if there will be pop ups, for example. Searching by technical features can have a lot of value for parents.

 

Something else that is special about this is that you can meet the people who make the apps. These people are parents, they’re creative, they are technically component and they care. You can contact the developer and even provide feedback to them that they can use in updating their apps!

 

The vast majority of the apps out there without the Moms with Apps logo just haven’t contacted us yet. We would love if people would see an app without the logo, and then contact that developer to let them know about getting the Moms with Apps logo so moms can see what’s inside their app prior to downloading! Developers are welcome to contact us at info@momswithapps.com.

 

Will there ever be a feature that allows users to rate apps?

 

That is actually in our Q4 update! We are currently figuring out the best way to do that. We are trying to make a way that parents can comment, saying why they like the app, and immediately get feedback from the developer. In a lot of the stores, if someone rates an app, the developer doesn’t have an easy way of producing feedback.

 

Are most of the apps on your site from independent developers?

 

Yes, most of them are independent developers.

 

Do you have plans to go after the bigger names apps, or are you trying to stay with the independent developers?

 

We are seeing that this is a better area for the smaller independent developers. Our strength comes from our community.

 

If an app doesn’t have the Moms with Apps logo, does that mean that the app doesn’t meet the criteria or just that it hasn’t been vetted?

 

What is the next big thing for Moms with Apps?

 

We’ve had a lot of feedback from developers that they want more social sharing features! We want to continue to make it more of a place that people can find the specific apps that they’re looking for, be it a specific theme or other criteria.

 

Connect with Moms With Apps

 

Find Moms With Apps on Twitter @momswithapps and on Facebook at Facebook.com/momswithapps.

 

Note: “This post is brought to you by Moms With Apps and The Motherhood. All opinions are my own.” 

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