Gospel Library iPhone app leads to YouTube - DELETED IT

Hi - thanks for developing the Gospel Library iPhone app. We tried it today but deleted it once we saw that LDS.org was available with links leading to Youtube. We have agreed in our family that all iPhones and Ipod Touches are to have Safari, You Tube and other items disabled in Settings-->Restrictions.

As you know, there are a large number of apps on the AppStore that use and internal Webkit to view local HTML, help files on the device, help files hosted remotely, or often credit pages hosted remotely. It simply takes tapping around for a while until there is a link to Google, or Twitter, etc, and then one can be off and surfing the web from within the app.

So, Gospel Library iPhone app, falls into this category. It provides a "back door" to the web via the LDS.org page.

Please consider removing the use of an internal browser, or anything which in any way connects to the web. Or, block all links to anything except LDS.org. Until then, we will have to avoid it and go with alternatives.

Thanks

Rob

I fully, wholeheartedly, disagree with this request, and hope the developers pay it no mind.

Sadly, I think people try to solve a social problem (accessing inappropriate content on the web) with a purely technological solution (disabling a browser et al.). Such solutions never work for long, and without solving the social problem, sooner rather than later, the technological solution fails to work any longer.

How is it that one's family keeps the Sabbath day holy without physically locking everyone up in a closet in the house, unable to conduct commerce, unable to go to sporting events, unable to go to work? One does it by consistently, and diligently teaching the correct principle, solving the social issue of Sabbath observance by social means. I believe this example is directly analogous to media/information access in the home (as well as any other number of moral and ethical standards and practices).

I believe that consistently and diligently teaching the correct principles of personal purity and responsibility, one solves issues by giving one's family the tools necessary to make correct decisions by themselves and not have the default decision made for them by (imperfect, bound-to-fail) roadblocks.

This is clearly a family's own decision. While the Church has created a Facebook page and has done wonderful things with You tube videos, the Adversary has inspired others to abuse it and destroy men and women worldwide. This is why the family is the central unit in our Heavenly Father's plan; parents know their children and those areas in which extra caution is necessary. While we all hope that we can fall into the "teach them the correct principles, and let them govern themselves" category, we have to do what we think is best for our specific family.

That being said, I absolutely love this ap and will install it on those iTouches we have in our house. I too am in agreement to not only keep it, but please continue to add as many features to it as possible.

Just my two cents worth.

njpomeroy wrote:I fully, wholeheartedly, disagree with this request, and hope the developers pay it no mind.

Sadly, I think people try to solve a social problem (accessing inappropriate content on the web) with a purely technological solution (disabling a browser et al.). Such solutions never work for long, and without solving the social problem, sooner rather than later, the technological solution fails to work any longer.

How is it that one's family keeps the Sabbath day holy without physically locking everyone up in a closet in the house, unable to conduct commerce, unable to go to sporting events, unable to go to work? One does it by consistently, and diligently teaching the correct principle, solving the social issue of Sabbath observance by social means. I believe this example is directly analogous to media/information access in the home (as well as any other number of moral and ethical standards and practices).

I believe that consistently and diligently teaching the correct principles of personal purity and responsibility, one solves issues by giving one's family the tools necessary to make correct decisions by themselves and not have the default decision made for them by (imperfect, bound-to-fail) roadblocks.

While your disagreement has much merit, it is beside the point of the request. You responded to the original poster's motivation, rather than the actual bug report. The fact of the matter is that this mobile application is currently capable of being used in a way that is beyond its intention. The app is not supposed to be a general purpose web browser, and I don't think the Church would want its app used in this way.

This is indeed a technical issue, regardless of the original poster's personal motivations.

One of the things that the Youtube postings of General Conference (it's all on there) does is that it makes the prophetic word available more readily to the world, in a way that many want to hear it, or will hear it for the first time. Youtube has helped greatly in the missionary effort since the Mormon Messages page went live, and the posting of Conference, along with the other content on that page, will only help, not hurt.

In fact, directing to Youtube can raise the awareness of the video on Youtube, and in fact, after the posting of portions of Elder Holland's Easter talk last year, that talk alone propelled the Church to #1 in several areas. Including the top-viewed nonprofit page. That gives the Church more visibility, and piques the interest of nonmembers in the page, they come and find out about what we believe, and what the prophets are saying, today.

In fact, people browsing Youtube on their iPhones will find these videos, and we could well have more converts going forward because of it. The app can't store the videos, they are too large for the average iPhone's memory anyway, so it makes much more sense on that front to post them to a public site like Youtube and direct people there.

The other thing is, and this has been requested for some time, is that now we can share entire Conference talks on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc., favorite them on Youtube itself, and do more than we've been able to before with them simply by being able to link to the videos of them on Youtube.

Yes, the videos were already on YouTube before this mobile app came out, and yes, that is a good thing. Yes, the videos are too large to really put anywhere else, especially in the phone app.

But I still do agree with the original poster that the mobile application has a side effect ability of becoming a general purpose web browser. I don't think that's what the Church/Community developers intended, and it seems it would be best if the mobile app itself could be restricted to where it could browse to (even within Youtube somehow).

A possible solution is to use Youtube's embed code to display the video in the app rather than just link to the video using the Youtube-provided URL you would in an email message If you use the embed code instead, 'related videos' and other things don't show up, just the video itself. Is this a possible way to allow viewing of the Church content posted to Youtube without opening the door to the rest of the site?

Following on the same lines, there would need to be a 'back' button that you could click on to go back to the app after viewing the Youtube video itself.

As it is, the Conference videos have received thousands of hits each already, some more than others.

Thanks for the replies. I do agree with the idea raised by njpomeroy that we should teach correct principles which lead to individual decisions. However, there is clearly a role for safety mechanisms. For example, I have heard the advice (from local leaders on up) to have the computer in a high-traffic area of the home (for example: http://tinyurl.com/y4kfhmw). So, how does one use the (excellent) browser on an iPhone in the spirit of using it in front of everyone for all to see (and thereby provide support and safety)? Internet usage on handheld devices is more private than it ever was on a fixed desktop computer in the living room. This is why we have chosen to lock out browsers on our devices. The decision that I hope my sons will make in the future is to choose to employ safety mechanisms for themselves when they are on their own.

That being said, it is true that one of my main reasons for posting was that I was fairly certain that the church would not want its app to be used in any way for surfing the dark regions of the internet. How ironic it would be for a person to locate pornography, violent or profane material via a church released app!

JamesAnderson wrote:A possible solution is to use Youtube's embed code to display the video in the app rather than just link to the video using the Youtube-provided URL you would in an email message If you use the embed code instead, 'related videos' and other things don't show up, just the video itself. Is this a possible way to allow viewing of the Church content posted to Youtube without opening the door to the rest of the site?

That sounds like a great idea in my humble opinion.

I like the Youtube solution but it does not address the other problem. If the internal Webkit allows one to peruse LDS.org pages, and there is an external link ANYWHERE (especially google, yahoo, bing, twitter, etc) on LDS.org, then one can skip from link to link until one is at a search engine. For example, this link

http://tinyurl.com/y3wnwt7

gets to a LDS.org page that has a link at the bottom to a church Twitter page. From there you could go to the main Twitter page and enter www.google.com as a search term to get a long list of tweets with www.google.com as a weblink. Hit the link and you are at the Google search page - FROM WITHIN THE CHURCH's APP. Proceed to search for whatever is desired - good or bad. All this is possible without the opportunity to enter in a URL into the browser.

This "back door" to the web exists in countless iPhone apps. It is, however, inappropriate for it to exist in a Church app (IMHO). Solutions could include: removing access to LDS.org from within the app as web pages, serving up church content in some other form, removing all links to google, twitter, facebook from LDS.org, only serving up a portion of LDS.org, etc. Some of these are not very practical. Perhaps there is a more technical solution?

Does anyone else think it is inappropriate for a Church-issued app to have this kind of "back door?"

It seems to me that the ability to surf the web is a major component of the iPhone itself. If you don't want it you then don't get an iPhone. (Sorry to be so blunt. I realize you already have one but, given your aversion to the web, I wonder why you didn't get something else for a phone/PDA device.)

joej wrote:Does anyone else think it is inappropriate for a Church-issued app to have this kind of "back door?"

I've already expressed my agreement with you. Apparently we aren't getting any input from Church employees or the community volunteers working on the project; I am going to contact them about this bug and see if they have any ideas to address the problem. I think it could be tricky to fix, but I bet something can be done.

GregAnderson wrote:It seems to me that the ability to surf the web is a major component of the iPhone itself. If you don't want it you then don't get an iPhone.

There's already a web browser, we don't need every app to potentially be a web browser. Even though you could still just quit the LDS app and go to the phone's web browser to look at inappropriate things, for me there's also a second problem (beside the issue brought up by joej that the Church likely wants to distance itself from endorsing browsing anything on the web via its app). The app has a technical bug, in which the app can be used in a way that is different than the Church and the community developers intended the app to be used.

mkmurray wrote:I am going to contact them about this bug and see if they have any ideas to address the problem. I think it could be tricky to fix, but I bet something can be done.

It will be interesting to see what they have to say, but it may not be so easy.

I think the fix to Twitter might be to host a page that shows all the tweets. I'm not sure as there's any fix for the links YouTube passes once the video is done. Not only is this a technical issue, but a legal one as well. We have to respect the TOS of these services. The back door might just have to be the price we pay to use those services.

A question we must be ready to answer: are we better off with these apps even if we have the back door, or are we better off without the app?

Another question: Should we rely on filtering that only works at the browser level and not the network level? If we have filtering at the network level, then there is no "back door".

I've seen a solution for the lds.org side of things before... using just css, if a custom css file is designed to be used on mobile devices (which will most likely happen anyway to make the site more mobile friendly) then you can just add a class like ".extlinks" to the area you don't want and just give it a display:none or visibility:hidden...

I haven't used the iPhone app personally so I can't be sure this would solve everything... but I think it would be easier to do it here then implement the same measure for every version of the mobile app. (Android, WM 6+, WebOS)

This is great feedback. Of course we don't want the app to be used to surf questionable material. We'll look into implementing a solid approach.

Again, thanks for the solid feedback everyone.

It seems to me the obvious solution is to change the function of the way the the link to lds.org is handled within the app so that it launches/switches to Safari directly/externally instead of internally. Then if Safari is "locked out" there will be a system generated pop-up to the effect that the app can't launch Safari. That way the app is going through the "front door" to display lds.org content instead of "back door" browser access to Safari.

It seems to me that the iPhone email application (and just about any other email client I can think of) already does this. If you are reading an email message that has a link in it, taping that link switches out of the email app and launches Safari (as it should) instead of displaying the results of the link without every leaving the mail app by embedding the browser functions within the app.

Access to the internet is not the problem here. The problem is the action of using the internet to access something that is bad. You can not design the App to prevent someone from sinning, the sin or desire to sin is in the person not in the vehicle used to access the bad content. The internet is only a tool, just like a library is a tool, you can use it to look for good or for bad. Banning access to the internet does not solve the problem of someone seeking evil. We solve that problem by teaching correct behavior. Trying to prevent sin by banning all access to the world will never work, just like banning guns will not prevent evil people from committing violent acts. I see no problem with this App providing access to lds.org which may have a link out to the internet. It is no different than a door on the church building letting someone leave the church and go out into the world where they might encounter something bad if they go looking for it. We are to live in the world but not participate in the bad it has to offer, not remove ourselves from the world by banning all access to it. We came to this world to see how we would behave in it, not to see if we can hide from it, that would not be a test. Having access to the things of the world and not accessing them is how we prove ourselves.

Here's the best analogy I can think of for why the app needs to change (which the Church has already agreed to look into):

This situation would be like the Church building a new meetinghouse where there are cable TV hookups in each room. The intent was that you could hook up a TV from the library and show content from BYUTV or something similar. However, it has been found out that you can actually just change the channel on the TV and watch inappropriate material on HBO if you want or whatever channel the cable provider offers.

Yes, we could teach people not to change channels as the right behavior. But there seems there could be something done technically to restrict what cable offerings are allowed in the meetinghouse. And yes, you can leave the meetinghouse and go to your home and watch whatever you want, but it is a matter of principle that the Church doesn't want to have the appearance of advocating watching such inappropriate content (or even just non-Church related content) within a Church meetinghouse.

The tie-in to my example is that this mobile application is like the meetinghouse, and it has a new feature like the cable hookups installed. There has now been found a way to use the new feature in a way that was not originally intended, like changing the channels on the TV and getting different content from the cable provider (which would be the internet in general I suppose). The hope is that the developers of this mobile app can code a restriction into what "cable channels" are offered to the mobile app. If you want to go look at inappropriate material on your mobile device, then that is your prerogative, but you should have to leave the "meetinghouse" and go to a different app on your device in order to do that.

I don't really think the analogy fits. For starters the nature of the web is that sites link together like a web. It is designed that you should move from content in one place to another. It is not like a linear platform such as TV.

On the other hand though I agree that content that appears in a church application should be editorially appropriate.

Taking both of these points into account my first preference would be as in post #16 that web content is launched externally. A halfway house may be that access to sites outside of lds.org would launch in safari and any lds.org site could still be browsed inside the church app.

silid wrote:A halfway house may be that access to sites outside of lds.org would launch in safari and any lds.org site could still be browsed inside the church app.

I agree with this.

This seems like a good proposal… but… My concern is that attempts to restrict what the software can do will have unintended consequences. And, since those consequences are unintended, I can't really predict what will go wrong.

The fact that the church has an official presence on YouTube and social networking sites means that, somewhere up the chain, someone has decided that being “in the world” is worth the risk (to both the church and to its members). This discussion is based on catering to one family’s policy about how it uses mobile devices. I’m not comfortable with the idea of imposing that policy on everyone else.

GregAnderson wrote:This seems like a good proposal… but… My concern is that attempts to restrict what the software can do will have unintended consequences. And, since those consequences are unintended, I can't really predict what will go wrong.

I'm sure the developers won't ship a fix that renders the app unusable, and I doubt they'll remove the feature entirely (I hope they don't, but can instead find a way to make it work).

GregAnderson wrote:This discussion is based on catering to one family’s policy about how it uses mobile devices. I’m not comfortable with the idea of imposing that policy on everyone else.

Even if the original poster intended this, I certainly have not. I am only championing the merits of the bug found, and not anything in relation to the original poster's personal or family moral convictions. And it is indeed a bug as the feature can be made to work in a way that was not intended.