5.19. Settings: A Matter of Preference

The last several pages have focused on controls which, when piled all together, become especially handy on settings pages to toggle, slide, and select values for your app's preferences. That raises the question: just where should your app's settings go? Apple recommends that you carve certain types of settings out of your app and stow them away in the built-in Settings app, which includes app-specific settings in addition to general-purpose system settings. That's what you should do if you play it by the book, but seriously: don't play it by the book.

Apple's HIG makes a distinction between "settings" and "configuration options." Settings affect nitty-gritty foundational aspects of how your app works. They're preferences that rarely change but determine the basic operation of the app: account login info, alert sounds, screen rotation preferences, notification settings, theme colors, font size, and so on. Apple says these settings belong in the Settings app. By contrast, configuration options are less about the app machinery and more about the app's content, choices that are likely to be changed more frequently, even from session to session: content categories, weather locations to monitor, volume controls, and anything that affects the type and manner of content display. If settings determine how the car fundamentally works, configuration options let you drive it. Apple says configuration options should be included inside the app.