How to avoid unwanted in-app purchases on an iPad

There’s a lot of articles in the press at the moment about people, usually children, running up huge bills buying virtual goods in iPad games.

If you want to avoid your loved one; sibling, child, parent buying stuff there are some settings you can use.

Go into the settings screen and select the ‘general’ option, then the ‘restrictions’ setting.

You need to enable restrictions which needs a new passcode – this should be different from the normal passcode – otherwise the person can turn off the restrictions.

Once restrictions are enabled you can see than in app purchases are enabled by default. You need to set the require password to ‘immediate’. Otherwise your loved on has 15 minutes to buy as much as possible.

That’s it!

It can be slightly annoying if you want to make an in-app purchase yourself – you have to enter your password every time . That’s a consequence of Apple assuming one user per device.