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Recent Story: My 8 year old has an iPad that was setup by her and her grandmother. She recently had it replaced at the Apple Store because of a busted WIFI ant

Recent Story: My 8 year old has an iPad that was setup by her and her grandmother. She recently had it replaced at the Apple Store because of a busted WIFI antenna. A few days ago, she wanted to buy the 2.99 version of Draw Something. I happened to have a iTunes gift card worth 15 dollars. I opened her iTunes account on the iPad, punched in the gift card code, and the money was added to her account without ceremony. So she goes to buy Draw Something,and 15 minutes later I hear "It's not working." I figure she must have broken something, so I take the iPad from her and click the 2.99 Draw Something button to download the app. This is where the fun begins. The App store asks for the username and password. We entered both. Then it tells us that the iTunes account has not been activated on the iPad, so we need to answer two security questions - I look at my daughter and my wife and only get blank expressions. I call my mother-in-law and she doesn't know either. So the next step is to reset the password by sending an email to a failsafe account - some AOL email address that nobody can access either. Normally, at this point, I would just say we screwed up and start a new iTunes account - but why in the hell did they let us put the 15 dollar gift card on the account if they weren't going to let us do anything until the account was activated? Epic fail.

driverdan 14y ago
So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?
- nchlswu 14y ago
  To be fair to the parent, this was setup by the daughter and the grandmother. In Apple's current world, a case like this is hardly farfetched. I don't think this a weird edge case that I Apple overlooks or one you can blame on the user since it's one of Apple's key markets
- padobson 14y ago
  That is not straight. We had the correct username and password. We lost the security questions. It asked us for neither when we wanted to redeem gift cards, and then wanted answers to the security questions after we had already given it the correct username and password before we could purchase anything using the gift card money. If it's going to inconvenience me to spend the gift card money, then it should do it before I redeem the card so that the card money isn't trapped within the account if the account is currently inaccessible. --edit Accounts are pretty broken on iOS in general. I once logged into my appleID using my Dad's iPhone to download an app for him because he hadn't setup his own appleID yet. Later, he setup his appleID. The problem was, whenever he went to update his apps, it would ask for my appleID password when it wanted to update the app that I installed - only it didn't mention anywhere why it was asking for the password to my appleID. My account credentials did not appear anywhere else on the phone. We checked the settings, looked up things online, and even asked support. No idea why it was asking for my password. Eventually we traced the problem back to the update feature, and deleted a bunch of apps we thought I may have installed. It solved the problem and it doesn't prompt for my password anymore, but there was no way for us to know which app was causing the problem.
  - driverdan 14y ago
    Ok, that makes more sense. From reading your original post I thought all the login info had been lost. I agree that their account system is poor and it isn't clear when you need to authenticate.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

driverdan 14y ago

So let me get this straight. You lost your account password, your email password, and your security questions and somehow Apple is at fault for making it easy to add gift cards to your account?

nchlswu 14y ago
To be fair to the parent, this was setup by the daughter and the grandmother. In Apple's current world, a case like this is hardly farfetched. I don't think this a weird edge case that I Apple overlooks or one you can blame on the user since it's one of Apple's key markets
padobson 14y ago
That is not straight. We had the correct username and password. We lost the security questions. It asked us for neither when we wanted to redeem gift cards, and then wanted answers to the security questions after we had already given it the correct username and password before we could purchase anything using the gift card money. If it's going to inconvenience me to spend the gift card money, then it should do it before I redeem the card so that the card money isn't trapped within the account if the account is currently inaccessible. --edit Accounts are pretty broken on iOS in general. I once logged into my appleID using my Dad's iPhone to download an app for him because he hadn't setup his own appleID yet. Later, he setup his appleID. The problem was, whenever he went to update his apps, it would ask for my appleID password when it wanted to update the app that I installed - only it didn't mention anywhere why it was asking for the password to my appleID. My account credentials did not appear anywhere else on the phone. We checked the settings, looked up things online, and even asked support. No idea why it was asking for my password. Eventually we traced the problem back to the update feature, and deleted a bunch of apps we thought I may have installed. It solved the problem and it doesn't prompt for my password anymore, but there was no way for us to know which app was causing the problem.
- driverdan 14y ago
  Ok, that makes more sense. From reading your original post I thought all the login info had been lost. I agree that their account system is poor and it isn't clear when you need to authenticate.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]