It is not the first and certainly not the last time that Apple will be called to court to answer the accusations brought against it by customers dissatisfied with the in-app purchases service. A man from Pennsylvania sued the company accusing that the in-app purchases system is specially designed to attract minors to spend money on purchases that end up costing hundreds of dollars. You probably already know about the Smurf's Village app, whose developers have been accused of intentionally offering very expensive in-app bonuses and trying to deliberately trick users into buying them. Something like this is also happening in the case of Apple in this new process.
"These games are highly addictive, designed deliberately so, and tend to compel children playing them to purchase large quantities of Game Currency, amounting to as much as $100 per purchase or more," the suit alleges.
Players, even though they are minors, were enticed to buy currency in one-click sums of $99.99 or more, "causing Apple to pocket millions of dollars from such ... transactions with minors and without the authorization of their parents, whose credit cards or PayPal accounts are automatically charged for the purchases."
In the summons request, it is specified that the password required to make the purchase from the application is identical to the one required to buy or download an application and minors can easily make the purchase if the password was entered no more than 10 minutes before. Unfortunately, Apple is not to be blamed here, because it is not Apple that makes the applications, but the developers who design them in such a way as to earn as much money as possible. I don't know if establishing separate passwords would be auspicious because many users will complain about the fact that they will have to enter so many passwords to make a simple purchase. I for one think that the problem is with parents who leave their children unattended and when they wake up, with hundreds of dollars spent, they blame whoever they can.
