Welcome to Pixalate’s CTV & Mobile App Manual Reviews According to COPPA, a series containing the detailed factors the Trust & Safety Advisory Board educators used to assess an app’s child-directedness.
The educators manually review thousands of mobile apps available in the Google Play & Apple App Stores as well as connected TV (CTV) apps from the Roku Channel Store and Amazon Fire TV App Store using the COPPA Rule factors shown below & make those results available to the public at ratings.pixalate.com.
This post takes a look at a popular mobile app (1 million+ downloads) from the Google Play Store & Apple App Store. Our reviewer discusses how the subjective factors set forth in the COPPA Rule apply to the app and factor into the reviewer's determination as to whether the app is child-directed or general audience (i.e., it is not targeting children).
The teacher will indicate the factors they relied upon in their assessment using the 10 factors shown below that reflect the 10 child-directed factors in the COPPA Rule.
The Township's gameplay is to choose buildings, collect resources, and develop a town in order to increase the population. Players will start off in a startup town where players will cultivate crops and plow land. Players have to construct homes and other buildings to make money by investing in your crops to produce a variety of goods. The visual content and animation is lively and engaging with comical cartoon animations that are very detailed which appeal to children. Township is an enjoyable and addictive game. Every activity is task integrated. It is a free simulation building game with continuous playtime that is simple to learn as players watch their towns blossom.
In the game, for example, players can milk cows after feeding them to produce milk in order to receive gold coins or rewards to level up. It costs in-game coins or tokens to build the structures, get materials, grow crops, and speed up the construction process. Coins can be earned in many different ways such as daily rewards, customer boosters,filling orders, completing tasks, or market boosters.
There is no age gate to play the game. The app does have in-app purchasing. It is rated E for Everyone in the Google Play store and 4+ in the iOS store.
Privacy:
The developer’s privacy policy states, “no one under the age of 16 may provide personal data...we do not knowingly collect or solicit personal data about or direct or target interest based advertising to anyone under the age of 16..we will process your personal data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes for which it was collected. ”
Find Pixalate's full catalogue of reviews in our CTV and Mobile App Review Page
Screenshots of Township
Pixalate’s Trust and Safety Advisory Board was created to bring in individuals with experience using child-directed apps in the classroom to review and assess which apps are child-directed. This manual review process serves to quality check Pixalate’s automated review process. See our full methodology for more information.
Disclaimer
This blog post published by Pixalate is available for informational purposes only and is not considered legal advice. By viewing this blog post, the reader understands and agrees that there is no attorney-client relationship between the reader and the blog publisher. The blog should not be used as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in the applicable jurisdiction(s), and readers are urged to consult their own legal counsel on any specific legal questions concerning any specific situation. The content of this blog post reflects Pixalate's opinions with respect to factors that Pixalate believes may be useful to the digital media industry. Pixalate's opinions are just that, opinions, which means that they are neither facts nor guarantees; and this blog post is not intended to impugn the standing or reputation of any entity, person or app, but instead, to report findings pertaining to mobile and Connected TV (CTV) apps.
