When Smurfs’ Village hit the App Store in November 2010, it initially seemed like a fairly innocuous take on the FarmVille formula -- but almost immediately, it shot to the top of the Top Grossing charts and continues to linger in the higher spots to this day. Certainly, the enduring popularity of those cartoon creatures and their colorful adventures explained, in part, the phenomenon. However, it quickly became clear that not only was the scale of the game’s in-app purchases unlike anything we’d seen before, but that parents weren’t always aware of their kids’ buying habits. And worse yet, the kids might not have known what they were doing.
Do you really want to spend $100 on Smurfberries? Probably not.
Sure enough, the Beeline Interactive game is one of the more aggressively business-minded freemium offerings out there, as it offers you the ability to skip through otherwise tedious actions by purchasing Smurfberries, which come in bundles that range in price from $4.99 to $99.99 -- that’s in real United States dollars. But when the game was released last fall, the iOS version at the time allowed users to make multiple in-app purchases within a 15-minute window using only a single password entry -- and if you’d handed off your phone just after buying something from the App Store, a child could accidentally buy hundreds of dollars of virtual berries without entering a password or knowing the real-world implications.
Tapping any of these options will bring up the “Confirm Your In-App Purchase” dialog above.
The result was a lot of bulging App Store bills and angry parents -- not to mention grumblings from senators and consumer advocacy groups -- and reported refunds for folks who argued the charges. Luckily, things have changed since then: each in-app iOS purchase now requires a password, and many apps have introduced self-imposed limits to ease the potential financial pain. Smurfs’ Village in particular allows only five in-app purchases within 15 minutes now, while an app like Zynga Poker blocks virtual chip sales after reaching a certain quota for a day.
But the $100 in-app purchases remain intact and are popping up in many more free-to-play games, and anyone with access to your iTunes password can add such charges to your balance within seconds. Luckily, a couple options exist for avoiding significant in-app purchase charges. The most definitive option lies under Settings > General > Restrictions on an iOS device, and lets you set a numerical passcode and choose to disable all in-app purchases. Just like that, users will be unable to buy in-app items unless you change it back.
Restricting in-app purchases can keep your wallet safe from mistakes.
You might also consider utilizing the iTunes Allowance feature, which is found under the “Buy iTunes Gifts” option in the iTunes Store on your computer. From there, you can set a monthly amount -- from $10 to $50 -- to gift to another user, such as a child or another family member. With this option, kids have a set monthly total to use for buying full games and in-app items, so you’ll never have to worry about opening up a credit card statement full of surprise Smurfberries again.
