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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

I have to explicitly approve every install and purchase on my kids' iPod Touches. I don't know if they would need a fingerprint on my phone to be able to spend money there, but I assume all the tools are in place to control this sort of behaviour. Apple really need to make it clearer and easier for people.

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I disable in app purchases in their entirety on my own personal iOS devices. Mainly cause I’m paranoid that I’ll accidentally tap something and then accidentally approve it when trying to hit the home button.

I’ve had apple devices for years, and I’ve gone in and manually enabled the ability to in-app purchase less than a half a dozen times.

(This, and similar restrictions are buried in the screen time settings, in “content and privacy restrictions”)

Ironically the majority of purchases I make on iOS are in Audible, for which Amazon refuses to pay App Store fees so I have to do it all in a browser. I guess that’s one case in which I wish it was simpler to spend my money/credits.

as much as i dislike amazons practices, i have to cheer them on for doing this. apples fees are atrocious, and amazon is helping people to get used to alternate ways of spending. if more people do this eventually apples control of transactions can be broken.

Seconded. I'm on Android, my kid uses my phone, and he can't buy anything on his own as I have to type in my password for each purchase. If I recall correctly, I had to choose this behavior the first time over (no default, you moved on by picking one or the other), then it remembered my choice. Is anyone's experience different?

They could make that the default behavior. But I suspect someone whose mandate is moneymaking would veto it.

Has anyone done a breakdown of Apple's profit from hardware vs (in-)app purchases? Feels like this is a situation where they're not selling the devices as loss leaders, and could easily improve people's experiences and perceptions by cracking down a bit, without it really costing them much. Feels along the same lines as the privacy push - they _could_ make lots of money selling your data, but they're selling the peace of mind as a feature.

That is somewhat misleading as some apps are essentially shareware, aka free with a single in app purchase to the the full version.

I think Apple would be well served by limiting in app purchases to either 200$ over the lifetime of app or 20$ per month. That would get rid of most bad press without costing them much. They could even then allow specific exceptions on a case by case basis.

This would make the business model for gatcha games (which rely on a small fraction of their player base sendings tens of thousands of dollars each) essentially impossible.

So a net gain for everyone, then.

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