Every time my little nephew sees me, he reaches out to grab my phone from my pocket. Even though he has barely learned to speak, he can unlock my Android phone and swipe the screen to launch the music player. The way new generations, especially the kids, are being exposed to the smartphones makes you a little uneasy as there are so many apps and online content that cannot be considered appropriate for the young children. Google already knows about the concerns of parents and has recently updated the Play Store app for Android devices with some new parental control features in mind.
The new version of the Google Play Store comes with a new parental control features. Here is how you can enable and configure them:
- First of all, update the Google Play Store to the latest version. The parental control features are available in version 6.0.0 and above. You can wait for the Play Store to be updated automatically, or you can make Play Store update to the latest version quickly.
- In the Play Store app, open the menu and select Settings from there. Then touch on Parental Controls from the screen that shows up.
- On the Parental Controls screen, tap on the On flip switch to enable these controls. To prevents the kids from changing the parental settings, these are protected with a PIN that you have to set.
- Once the PIN has been set, you are taken to a screen where you can change the content restrictions for children. You can change the movies, apps and games ratings. For all of these you can change the age based ratings from content suited for 3+ years old to 18+ years old.
Conclusion: Google Play Store has millions of apps and some of them are not really so well suited for the young children. Now you can change the parental control settings in Google Play Store app to restrict the content that can be accessed through the store.