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Is there a way to suppress gesture recognition? What inspires me to ask this question is watching my grand-daughter, who is a toddler, using an iPad. Quite often, she will accidentally invoke a gesture recognizer that switches apps. An example of this would be the four finger gesture where you can slide an app out of the way.

For a "child proof" app, is it possible to suppress these? Failing that, is it possible to suppress switching to another app? At first thought, that seems out of scope of an app, but maybe there is a way to do it.

Michael Petrotta
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Victor Engel
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3 Answers3

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I had the same requirement, but you cannot override the gesture recognition. It takes priority over your app. Actually I wanted to do an app for my baby and had the same requirement!, but you cannot disable the gesture recognition on a non jail broken device ;(

manuelBetancurt
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You don't need to do it in your app, because it is an accessibility feature of iOS 6. It is called "Guided Access" and you can enable it in Settings -> General -> Accessibility in the Learning section.

David Brunow
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  • Is it available in iOS5? I ask because my daughter has not upgraded yet because of youtube. – Victor Engel Nov 30 '12 at 04:07
  • No, it was added in iOS6. YouTube isn't that important :) – David Brunow Nov 30 '12 at 04:10
  • Heh, it is for some people. Anyway, there are two iPads in her household. Last I knew, one was kept on iOS5 for youtube. The other was upgraded to iOS6. After I installe Chrome on mine, I had perfectly acceptable youtube. Maybe Google has come out with a full sized iPad app for youtube by now. That's what my daughter was waiting for. Anyway, don't want to get too sidetracked. – Victor Engel Nov 30 '12 at 04:15
  • Understood. I use the Guided Access with my daughter and it works great. I made an app for her, and I use it with GarageBand also. You can even set it up as a triple-click of the home button for easy access. – David Brunow Nov 30 '12 at 04:17
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No, but you can turn off it in settings manually. Go to settings> general> Multitasking gestures. I dont think we can control this via coding for normal apps, but you can inform the user to disable it here through an alert before using the app. That is the most appropriate way available now.

iDev
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