Google Play Allows Parents to Take Control of Their Children's App Purchases

Google Play recently introduced another tool to give more control power to parents and families. On Tuesday's blog, the digital play store announced its newest feature - Purchase Requests.

To protect parents and guardians from the horrifying situation of children racking up thousands of dollars in credit card debt off in-app purchases, Google Play's new feature requires children to ask for their parent's approval for app purchases.

"Young people are forced to 'Ask in a message' before completing the purchase, which then sends a request to the parent account. Parents also have the option to find out more information about the app itself," Gizmodo reported.

Parents' approval needed for children's app purchases

This new Purchase Requests feature is in addition to the existing family payment method, where the "family managers," who created the accounts, decide which Google services to utilize and manage family payment methods, share a common form of payment with their family members on separate devices.

Children will be asked to send a purchase request directly to the family managers, who can evaluate the request and learn important information about the app or in-app purchase on their own devices. They can then decide if the app purchase should be completed or not, Google blog stated.

If the family managers decide to continue with the purchase, they can use their own stored payment methods, which include Google Play gift cards. They will receive real-time notifications for the purchase request, and the transaction will be recorded in their Order History.

If they have yet to decide whether to purchase the app or not, it will be placed on the approval request queue for completion later on.

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Google's Family Link getting more and more pro-parent

The play store assured parents and family managers that their payment details and method would be kept from the children or members who requested approval for purchase. Thus, it is safe and efficient.

The new feature is giving parents a way to buy app purchases without having to add their credit or debit card to their children's account or sharing it as a family payment method, leaving the control power and the opportunity to abuse their cards to their kids and other members of the family account.

As per How to Geek, Google Play now enables parents to keep their payment method to themselves while still being able to buy the occasional game or in-game item for their children.

Google has set up a new support page that will assist parents and caregivers with the setup process, which starts by setting themselves up as the manager of the family group account.

This new feature is under Google's Family Link, which has been allowing parents and guardians to supervise, manage, and monitor their kids' apps and screen time since 2017.

Google redesigned the Family Link last October, introducing a new Controls tab to set limits for screen time for children's devices and manage app data permissions. Further, it has also created a central tab for seeing app downloads, purchase requests, and blocked websites.

The latest feature before this new one was the location tracking for children's devices in real-time, which made Google pay $392 million to state attorney generals due to "unwanted location data collecting."

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