Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsTablet works fine; Kids+ subscription is a nightmare.
Reviewed in the United States on April 3, 2024
I got this tablet for my 6 year old because she's been practicing with ipads at school and we wanted to help her with some key areas around responsible device usage at home. The tablet and case itself are decent. They don't feel as sturdy as I had expected, but the case has a good thickness to be easy for my kiddo to grasp. I ordered another case that's a little thicker and has a carrying handle, and I like that one better than the case that came with the tablet. Installing the micro SD card that I bought (directly from an Amazon recommendation associated with this tablet at purchase) was incredibly confusing. It didn't work initially so I Googled and found many parents with similar challenges, and finally found a solution (you have to install the SD card while you're logged into the tablet on your parent profile, not the kid profile that auto-loads at startup).
My reason for the low review here is primarily about the Amazon Kids+ subscription that comes with 1 year free. Wow, just....wow. Imagine the checkout lane at a grocery store in the late-90s, filled with junky toys, candy, magazines, etc at kid level so that every parent can spend 10 minutes in line constantly saying "No, we can't buy that today, stop touching that, put that back"...then multiply that memory by 100, and you have the Amazon Kids+ subscription. I cranked the parent controls down as much as the settings would allow and limited content specifically to just ages 6-7, and the content screen still said "There are 27,750 items available" for my kiddo. I'm not exaggerating that number. The quality of the vast majority of these 27k+ apps, videos, and books is absolute garbage, filled with ads and prompts to buy things in-app. I tried limiting it to just "educational" material by maxing out the setting for "complete educational goals before allowing entertainment content" but Kids+ clearly has a very broad definition of what counts as "educational" and this didn't really help much.
I had the Kids+ subscription active for all of an hour, and both my kiddo and I were so incredibly frustrated by the end of that time. It was overwhelming. Her home screen was filled to the brim with junk I couldn't remove. The content she downloaded in that time was glitching so often that my kiddo was in tears. I reviewed all the parental controls again and again, trying to figure out how to set up only the apps my kiddo wanted. Everything on the Kids+ subscription is opt-out, not opt-in. Yes, you can absolutely disable content you don't want your kid using --- but you have to do it MANUALLY, one app/video/book at a time. I don't want to sit down and scroll through a list of 27k pieces of content, manually unchecking boxes so that my kid's tablet isn't stuffed with junk. I even tried searching for the apps that my kiddo had managed to download in that hour, and the search feature in the content area of the Dashboard works really poorly -- I pasted the exact app title into the search field, and I still had to scroll through non-exact title matches for pages to locate the app I wanted to disable access for.
Once again, I Googled and sure enough, again I found tons of posts online from parents similarly frustrated. It took some digging before I confirmed that the overwhelming content situation was due entirely to the Kids+ subscription. Some parents shared that they resolved this by downloading some apps and then turning off wifi or using Airplane Mode to disable the ability to search new content, but I found that this didn't work because so many of the apps we downloaded need the internet to run.
So I decided to cancel the Kids+ free trial and get rid of the subscription. Since it was still in the 1-year free trial, i received a cheerful pop-up confirming that my subscription had been cancelled but that I can "enjoy the remainder of my free trial." There was no option to just cancel it outright and get it off the tablet immediately. Considering that I had used it for all of an hour, essentially I had to leave the free trial active for the next 364 days!
Back to Google I went. Finally, I found some parent posts that explained that to get rid of the free trial immediately on the tablet, you can log into your Subscriptions area in your Amazon account (NOT the Parent Dashboard) and simply uncheck the access to the Kids+ trial for each kid's device. I did that, and BOOM, the entire tablet became a much more usable product.
All the overwhelm is gone! Now, I hand-select free and paid content of my choice from the Amazon Appstore and Kindle Unlimited, and I choose when to make it available on my kiddo's device. Once I got all of the above steps done (which took several hours thanks to having to Google everything and learn from other parents), finding and adding the content I wanted was super fast.
All in all, I'm happy with the tablet now that I've got it set up in a much more usable way for my kiddo. I'm not at all happy with the Kids+ subscription service or Amazon's setup documentation. It should not have been this difficult for me to find how to manage or turn off the Kids+ stuff. By the end of that nightmare, it really felt like the Kids+ subscription is just designed to turn kids into little buying machines, and to cause parents to purchase digital content without full awareness simply due to the overwhelming amount of content on there and kids constantly downloading things and submitting purchases for review. Parents' lives are hard enough, and we need technology that supports us and makes our lives easier, not technology that just creates a digital version of that grocery store checkout line experience on steroids. Given how hard it was for me to find solutions in this case, and that I had to repeatedly find answers outside of Amazon's materials, I have to conclude that this is by design on Amazon's part.
If you have an older kiddo and you're comfy with more open-ended access or a very large content library, then Kids+ might work fine for your fam. If you're a parent of a young kiddo who doesn't want your kid to have so much access to content (even if it is "age limited"), your best bet is to just skip the Kids+ subscription entirely. When that's turned off, you can go to Amazon's digital content store and download any free or paid content you want to your account. Then use the Parent Dashboard to make it available on your kiddo's tablet.
My kiddo's tablet now has a folder with a bunch New Reader books, a few coloring apps, PBS Kids video and game apps, a few learning apps (ABCMouse, HOMER reading, Numberblocks, Khan Academy), and a couple of kid mindfulness apps (Sesame Street and the Breathing Bunny). I like that I can change these out whenever I need to -- as she grows out of apps or loses interest, I can remove them and add new ones that she's interested in. I can also add videos (such as the Grinch movie, which she loves), or audiobooks from audible. She doesn't have access to the Store, the Web, or the Call functions yet -- I like that I can turn those off and on myself. This approach feels super manageable, and I have peace of mind knowing that she's not overwhelmed with a deluge of ever-changing low-quality content. This means I'm not overwhelmed either, and that is what this mama needs!
