3-Month Amazon Kids+ Family Plan Trial

Unless they changed the user interface of the former Amazon FreeTime, this is a hard pass for me. I'd recommend the same for any parents who wants any control of what their kids watch, play, and read.

I first got hooked into FreeTime by seeing how many paid apps I could get for "free" by subscribing to their service--there plenty of fun apps that had great learning value.

But the way that Amazon does it is that your child is flooded with thousands of apps, books, and videos. While that sounds like a marvelous thing at first, you'll soon find that there are apps, books, and videos that you don't like. For example, for every high quality, educational game there are dozens of dopamine-inducing, brain cell-killing games that you'd rather your kid not get hooked on at 5 years old. And the worst part about it is, while they advertise that you have full control, you do--but they deliberately designed their interface so that you can't "add" apps like you can with the iTunes or Android stores. You MUST start with thousands of apps and delete them one by one (going just by the icon, with no name and no star ratings). Making matters worse, every few days they'll add more so you have to go in and block them.

Plenty of parents have voiced their frustrations at Amazon for years. Google "block freetime unlimited content and you'll see parents trading "hacks" on how to get around Amazon's horrible user interface. But Amazon has never fixed it. At first I thought it was incompetence, but after a while I realized it was more nefarious than that. While parents have an interest in letting their children access only the apps they carefully choose and curate, that's the exact opposite of Amazon's interest. They need to do deals with as many app developers as possible (who pay them money to be included) and they need to get as many of our kids hooked on as many of those apps as possible. They need kids to be curious about the Amazon-produced kids shows (which are very hit or miss, but all of which have advertising that kids can't resist).

I waited for a year for Amazon to fix it, but I ended up cancelling my FreeTime subscription. It was tough to lose access to a lot of great apps and books. But I found that I really only chose a handful of apps that my daughter loved, and so I ended up getting an iPad and paying for those (turns out you can get a ton of apps to keep for the $70 it costs you to "rent" them from Amazon for a year). And between Libby and Amazon Prime, I found that I had plenty of great access to books and videos--and I could choose which ones my kid could watch.

I'm an Amazon shareholder, so I normally don't mind them making money. But as a parent, the whole FreeTime thing seems a bit too sleazy to me. It's hard enough as a parent to protect our kids from information overload, and here's Amazon coming along and presuming that they know better than we do what's best for our kids.