Buying Apps in the Windows Store with Family Safety

You can find many free kids games in the Windows Store. However, more interesting games need payment. You either need to buy apps immediately, buy them after some testing, or use in-app payment to get more interesting offers.

Using family safety there are some issues with buying from the store – buying just doesn’t work with the kids account. I had some issues with this that I could all resolve, and this is explained with this article.

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Some questions I had:

• How to buy apps from the store with family safety?
• I don’t want to add my credit card to the kids accounts
• Do I have to buy the same app for every kid account?

All these questions are resolved with this article. Using the Windows Store with family safety does not work automatic. Doing this as I’ve finally found out, buying kids games with family safety can be done fine.

In case you try to buy apps from kids accounts with family safety turned on, timeouts can be the result. I never succeeded buying an app this way. At least there’s the issue that the URLs for the Windows store are not opened with family safety. I didn’t check to allow the correct URLs, maybe there would be some other issues as well I’ve found a better way.

Parent Account

First, a specific parent account should e created. For this account I didn’t use my major Microsoft account but added another one. These are the reasons for adding another Microsoft account:

• One Microsoft account can only install apps from the store using 5 PCs. With my PC’s and the PC’s of my children, this limit is exceeded.
• With my major account I don’t want to see all the games as my apps. The Windows store hast the great feature that just with a few clicks all my apps can be installed on a fresh new system. The children’s apps shouldn’t be part of this.
• One great feature of the Windows store is that with just a few clicks to install all my apps with just a few clicks.

Buying Apps with the Parent Account

Using the parent account it’s fine for me to add the credit card to the store. Now I can install games on the kid’s PC’s using this parent account. In-app payment is also done using this account. Games I’m buying for the children I need to test anyway, so it’s not an issue to start in-app payment from the parent account.

Installing Apps with Kids-Accounts

The next step is to install the app again using the kids account. One paid app can be installed on up to 5 PC’s – and this can be done from other accounts as well. First I’m logging into the kids-account. However, in the store I’m changing the account to the parents account. This is done from the charms bar, Settings, Your Account. Changing to the parent account in the store, it’s easy to find the paid apps again with Your Apps in the app bar. This also makes it easy to install the apps for every kid.

Summary

The easiest way to install paid apps for children is to use a dedicated parent account. First install the apps using this parent account. Logging in to the system with the kids account, changing the store to to the parents account, the apps can be installed again for the children.

It”s possible to install a paid app on up to 5 PCs. So this is fine for up to 5 children. I’m not planning to exceed this Windows limit

Have fun!

Christian

CN innovation

Comments

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Different opinions, everyone has his opinion, a decision will not satisfy everyone.

[Phone Recording]

You can share apps between accounts. But there’s a trick You need to change the Windows Store account to the account from which you’ve purchased apps