Bad news for any shady iOS developers out there: if you were sneakin’ In-App Purchase opportunities into the first 15 minutes of your game in hopes that lil’ ones might accidentally buy it, your evil-genius plan has been foiled.

For those who haven’t been keepin’ up on the ruckus: soon after Apple introduced In-App Purchase for iOS, someone figured out that users could make In-App Purchases without entering their iTunes password if said In-App Purchase was made within 15 minutes of purchasing the app. That’s a marvelous idea, in theory — no one likes entering their password multiple times.

The problem? Parents would buy games, hand’em over to their kid, and come back to find that pint-size had unknowingly bought up all sorts of virtual goodies (friggin’ Smurfberries!) with real world cash. As of this morning, this should no longer be possible.

Beginning with iOS 4.3, Apple will require your password be entered with every In-App Purchase, regardless of how recently a purchase had been made. As long as you keep Junior’s prying eyes away from your password, there shouldn’t be any more surprise charges for $99 boxes of virtual food for your kid’s virtual cat.

Or you could, you know, tell your kid to not buy these things. If they’re too young to understand that, they probably shouldn’t be using $500+ slabs of glass completely unsupervised anyway.

[Via Washington Post]

[Original Image courtesy of AtomicJeep on Flickr]

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