My 8 year old just bought a £150 app on our ipad!

warehouse

marleyboy wrote: »

I think that the problem is a 7Yr old is tech savvy. I would not let my Son download software without my say-so, whether or not it is free. I would not allow him the freedom to have a laptop\tablet in his bedroom, there are far too many dodgy apps or websites he could go to, even with a parental lock available.

If he wanted a particular app, I may or may not agree to it, but would not allow him to assume he can download anything he wants on there.

You know your Son, I know mine. I trust him due to past history with the ipad. The only dodgy thing about this in my view is apple.

warehouse

marleyboy wrote: »

What really gets my goat up, being the parent of a disabled child. Is just how expensive apps are for disabled people.

Yep, it's disgusting, completely agree.

Steve-o

A safer option when kids have an iDevice is one of those pre-paid cards available in most supermarkets. It gives them the freedom to have account access to download whatever free stuff they want, and limits what can be spent intentionally or accidentally.

warehouse

Steve-o wrote: »

A safer option when kids have an iDevice is one of those pre-paid cards available in most supermarkets. It gives them the freedom to have account access to download whatever free stuff they want, and limits what can be spent intentionally or accidentally.

Cheers Steve-o. I saw those before Christmas and spoke to my Daughter about them thinking it was a good idea. She told me that you can't buy apps with them, just music and films. I'll see if that's true.

Edit: Looks like she was wrong, and this will indeed be the way forward. Thanks again.

warehouse

Jivesinger wrote: »

Indeed they have... but it looks like this was in the US?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25748292

Edit: here's another article on this, showing how the order in which Apple displays screen prompts make it easy for this kind of thing to happen.
http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2014/01/16/apple-slapped-over-shabby-sales-security-in-the-app-store/

None of which helps the OP, I'm afraid.

That does help greatly, thank you for taking time to reply with those links, it's much appreciated.

marleyboy

warehouse wrote: »

You know your Son, I know mine. I trust him due to past history with the ipad. The only dodgy thing about this in my view is apple.

I certainly agree with you there, it is Apple who need to stop these auto purchases, not just for the sake of your Son, but what if it got stolen....just how many purchases could be downloaded before Apple stop them.

Albeit I do trust my Son, its the outside world of websites I dont trust.

Johnmcl7

warehouse wrote: »

Cheers Steve-o. I saw those before Christmas and spoke to my Daughter about them thinking it was a good idea. She told me that you can't buy apps with them, just music and films. I'll see if that's true.

Edit: Looks like she was wrong, and this will indeed be the way forward. Thanks again.

Yep, she's wrong so definitely a good option going forward. As the prepaid cards are easy to buy (the supermarkets stock them) you're not likely to miss out if there's something someone really wants to buy. I much prefer the prepaid cards form my various accounts (Android, Sony, Microsoft etc.) even though no-one else uses my devices as it's one less risk my credit card is exposed to.

With regards to the Apple judgment made by the FTC, it was specifically because there was no warning about the 15 minutes after a password had been entered where a purchase could be made without the password needing to be entered again which caught out some people. However, Apple claimed the fine was unnecessary as they had already been refunding people for accidental purchases at least in the initial instance and comments on forums seems to generally back that up. So if you don't have luck initially with whoever you speak to at Apple, I'd try again see if you get someone else more helpful.

John

securityguy

marleyboy wrote: »

What really gets my goat up, being the parent of a disabled child. Is just how expensive apps are for disabled people.

Let's say someone who's programming wants to make minimum wage. They write a niche application which has a small audience. It takes them, let's say, a couple of hundred hours of work (a tough month): and to design, test, document and get into a releasable state something which is innovative will usually take a great deal more than that. And an application such as the one you are talking about won't be being done by one person, as the chances of someone both understanding the assistive issues and being able to write decent quality code are remote. So you're talking about a month or so's work for a team of two or three people. At minimum wage (because, as we all know, there are plenty of skilled application developers happy to work for minimum wage, right?) they have probably done four hundred person-hours, which is about (including employer's NI and so on) at least four thousand pounds. Factor in Apple's markup through the shop, the costs of the equipment they used to do the development work, etc, etc and you're probably talking about a budget of five grand for a non-trivial application.

The market for such applications is tiny, because individual users' requirements are varied. Marketing is expensive.

If they charged ten quid, they'd have to sell five hundred copies to break even, compared to working as cleaners. There is no "Twitter" style opportunity for their application that they developed speculatively to break out into a massive, billion-dollar business: assistive technology simply isn't mainstream, for obvious reasons. Do you think they should work for free?

But if you think that it's possible to develop reliable, well-tested applications for people with disabilities and sell them for ten quid, it's free to download the XCode development environment and you can get a test certificate, at least, to test your code on real devices for free as well. Registering to sell it through the store is from memory 99 quid, but I might be mis-remembering. Why not show people how it's done? If you download the 122 page manual which, presumably, also wrote itself for buttons, you can see what you'll need to implement. Get to it!

albionrovers

Perseverance is the key. You may need to knock 3 times with any of these companies before you get anywhere.

From reading your posts, I'm sure you'll have no problems. Good luck.

System

Just read through this post even though I had nothing to contribute and took time to think about what that mum was going through. It must have been hell. Under the circumstances I'm not sure how I would have reacted or what I would have done.

It is good that MSE was first in the queue as the most likely place to get support. Support came, and a few curt replies. These occur whenever anyone posts asking for help. All too often people assume we should be more "savy" or know more than we do. We also tend to think "our child wouldn't do that", but hand on heart, given the circumstances, you never know.