11-yr. old accidentally downloads $999.99 App

[THUNDERDUCK]

An eleven-year-old boy in Northern California accidentally downloaded the $999.99 BarMax bar exam preparation application using an iPod touch. He didn't mean to make the purchase and was surprised when it started to download the 1GB app. His mother was equally shocked, especially after she learned the price and that her son had not been prompted for an iTunes password.

They paused the download and went to an Apple store but were told that the store couldn't help. However, the boy's mother then emailed Apple and received a return phone call telling her that they would receive a full refund.

[Amplifier]

I'm not certain the confirmations that the iProducts perform beforehand, but it would seem reasonable that anything over $1-5 would demand the owner's password before purchase.

Apple users, what's up with this?

[Slack]

From what I've noticed on my iPhone, the App Store only asks for your password the first time you download an app after you unlock the phone. I imagine this is to avoid being prompted for it before each download, which would be quite annoying if you're downloading say, 20 apps at a time in a given session.

The password prompt doesn't seem to be to verify the user's intent to download as much as it's there to verify the user's identity. (i.e. What if someone else is using your phone? The assumption is that the person unlocking the phone is the person who will be using it for the rest of the session until it is locked again.) For intent to download, the store instead requires two clicks on the download button to start the process.

In this particular case, the kid probably downloaded another app first, which prompted for his password. Then he somehow tapped the purchase/download button TWICE for the $1000 app.

While Apple's supposed user-experience-centric UI design generally tries to avoid annoyances by making assumptions in what 99% of users intend to do, here it resulted in bad press. For reasonably attentive users buying apps that only cost a dollar or two, this seems like a reasonable and low-risk assumption to make. The App Store just wasn't designed with particularly inattentive users or apps that cost hundreds of dollars.

I agree that the store should prompt for password EVERY time an app above a certain price threshhold is downloaded, and would not be surprised if that change is made for the next version of the iPhone OS.

[arun.yothin]

^ My iPhone always prompts me for a password when I download apps, even free ones. I never looked to see if there was such a setting since I want to be prompted so I don't accidentally download something.

[Slack]

Mine doesn't prompt every single time.  The second app I download usually doesn't prompt, but then again I've never downloaded a paid app.
Are you sure yours isn't the same?

[shurastriker]

a $999 app?

PLEASE!!!

[Slack]

It's a test prep app for the California Bar Exam, something like over 1 gig in size, with thousands of questions from previous exams and stuff like audio lessons, I think.

It was on the "What's Hot" list or something like that yesterday, but not anywhere to be found on the top lists today.
Perhaps that's related to this story?

[adventwriter]

I get prompted every time, except if I download more than one within a short frame of time.

[Slack]

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.  Maybe it's time-limited, unlike what I thought, but then again I've never downloaded a bunch of new apps at once.