Amazon Kids+ Reviews

by Rooster464

iPhone 12 Pro updated to latest iOS for reference. App is a wonderful idea but it’s broken half the time. It won’t update to show kindle reading progress half the time without resetting the kindle and the phone. Then even then it’s touch and go. When I go to add books from my library only a few are shown. Yeah I’ve played around with the settings and read the FAQ, boards , etc. it’s just buggy. Tried to uninstall and reinstall. Tried on different devices. For a paid service I expected better performance. Probably won’t be renewing my subscription when it runs out if problems aren’t fixed.

by Busy Teacher In KY

I’m very disappointed. I was really hoping for an app that we could use to download books my granddaughter could have on the plane on our way to France and to read to her while we are there, so that we wouldn’t need to bring dozens of books with us, taking up space and weight. This is not the case. If I turn off my cellular and WiFi access, I cannot reread any books I thought I had downloaded. And I have just read that AmazonKids is useless and will not work outside of the United States. This on top of the fact that there does not seem to be a good way to filter through junk books, so that she only selects quality literature has this retired teacher feeling that this is not an app that is useful for our family. I do not want to have to prevent her from selecting the prominent junk books, to get to the actual quality literature. I’m very disappointed!

by Please Revert App

New to this, but I downloaded it so my son could have access to lots of books to read. We download it and open it, and there are Super Mario Brothers gamer videos. Now our efforts to get him to read have turned into a tantrum.
Updated: I spent a while on the computer setting up parental controls. However, they didn’t take effect on my child’s account on the iPad. So I spent the time to set them up on the iPad. Still not working. I can’t get him to read when there are a bunch of tv shows for him to scroll through before getting to the books. Now I’m trying to cancel the subscription. It’s not intuitive, so I looked up instructions. The options are not available within the menus, as it says they should be. What a waste of my time!!

by Alydaniper

Not worth it. There is no real way to limit what is downloaded to my child’s tablet. I love the variety she has but HATE some of the things that are deemed “kid appropriate” my child is only 4 years old and found videos by “The Onyx Family” and has been saying odd things. I never would have thought it was from her tablet considering it’s mostly PBS and Disney content. I don’t know how those videos are appropriate for kids but it’s not for mine. There’s no way to put an age limit or block certain categories apps games etc. You can download just about everything they offer for free on a regular tablet with free apps and more control on content.

by K_savvy

On my older son’s fire tablet he has the bar at the top on the home screen that allows him to select games, books, apps, etc. but when I open AmazonKids on my iPad, AmazonKids looks completely different. There is no bar, and none of the games or apps we have allowed him to download are showing up. We did not realize this was an issue until I tried to download AmazonKids on my iPad for my younger son and wanted to allow him some of the same games as his brother. We noticed that we couldn’t download games or apps. I thought this was a setting issue, so my husband and I took both the fire tablet and iPad and began to take a look around, only to find nothing. Yes, in the parent dashboard we can still set controls and pause the tablet as a whole, but all I’m seeing on his home screen is books, movies, and shows. We monitor tablet usage and his content very carefully, but shouldn’t both of our apps look the same???

by Wounded82

In ITunes Store(not App Store), go to the bottom and select your Apple ID. Under the account settings menu that pops up, scroll down to subscription. You can cancel there.

As for AmazonKids itself, you can’t see the selection until you agree to the trial. Lots of books, which I give 2 stars for, but almost everything in the video section is already available on Prime. Also, I hear on devices other than Apple, they have more options, such as children’s apps and games. It’s ridiculous to charge IOS users the same subscription price, but not give us the same content everywhere else. I’m sure the reason apps aren’t available is licensing issues with Apple, but at least reduce the monthly fee. Won’t be keeping the subscription...

by Colomominacaliworld

There have been some videos my kids have asked for me to download and add to their fire tablets. When I download on my prime account I go to add and the videos will not sync anymore. They use to but now they are not. The apps and audibles will but the videos will no longer show up. We have had kids fire tablets for years and just early this year purchased the newer versions. Haven’t had any issue until just recently. It’s a bit of a headache and they end up watching on my iPad instead or just go without. We travel a lot to see family out of state and to check on my parents. So it would be great if I could get these to add to their profiles like before.

by DavidNY

NEW REVIEW: The new search is a welcome addition. But parental controls and limits still seem to have no effect at all on iOS. Why even offer them? It’s deceiving and makes the product seem broken.

OLD REVIEW: Search and filters are a must. My child is 7 but reads at a higher reading level. There is no way to set that. And there’s no way to search for things he’s interested in. He’s far beyond picture books, but the Harry Potter books show up alongside the Pete The Cat books. It’s the most disorganized library ever.

Also, I don’t want him watching videos or reading too late at night. I set those parameters in his profile on the website but they don’t seem to be reflected in AmazonKids .

by Jkm28

Ok let start with the good.. love the variety of books, games, and shows. We use these for the educational purposes. Love that you can set learning goals and time limits. Now.. on to things that seem to be pretty big issues that make me consider not repurchasing... it doesn’t seem to have a simple way to keep your child from downloading or deleting the apps, books, etc that are on there... so I have to turn off the WiFi on them.. which after a little while then the ones that are downloaded start acting weird and not working... plus every time they click something it automatically adds it to their carousel. I also wish there were descriptions of what the apps contain instead of having to download something that ends up not being what you thought. And maybe they could do something where a kids can add things to a wish list where parents can view and approve or deny a new book, game, show.. its kind of a bummer because I want to love the FreeTime and it really could be awesome if they got a few things working better and added a few management options. Really not sure we will renew.

by BLikeness

This is a really great app and I wish I could give it a better review however, longer books cannot be saved and cannot be bookmarked. My children get frustrated when they forget a book that they found and liked and then can’t remember what the title was because it couldn’t be saved anywhere for them. Also, for longer books there is no bookmark feature so they have to scroll all the way through a book which is frustrating for them as well.

by Cookie_Crumbs🍪

I’m only 11 years old, and I used to have a fire tablet that has games and stuff on it, so I’m not surprised it doesn’t have any games. It’s pretty decent, I’m not gonna lie. But there’s MUCH ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT! Like the videos for example, I watch Splatoon 2 and other stuff but there’s only one YouTuber I never watched, he’s pretty okay but I just wished there were different videos with DIFFERENT YOUTUBERS THAT YOU KNOW. I also wish that for the unlimited version which I have, you could play games on it and have more access to more videos. Other than that it’s okay.

by Sainoker

We have used the Epic app more more that five years and recently decided to try the Freetime app. to explore new books for our 9 and 4 years old daughters. Our fourth grade need to read everyday to complete her daily reading log for her school and need to record # of pages and time she read. In the Epic app I do not any problem with this; however, in the Freetime my daughters cannot use any of its books because it doesn’t show reading levels, book activity or numbers of pages for any of its books. I really like AmazonKids because it has a nice variety of books sadly my oldest daughters can’t use for school. It would nice if they also add a summary when pressing the book you want to read and also add a quiz as an option at the end of each book. I really hope they makes updates for AmazonKids. I will try it for a year and hope for the best!

by Whsbflfirhdbskabbd

Both my girls have a kindle fire with the kids subscription. We are thinking about getting an iPad because the fires can be quite glitchy and don’t work well for more than a couple years. So I downloaded AmazonKids on my iPhone to check it out. There are no apps/games. The books and videos are there but there are no games at all.
The only reason I’m keeping AmazonKids is because of the parents dashboard. It shows what they have been watching and playing and how much time they spent on each thing even on their Fire tablets. I wish there were a way to access that information on the actual kindle fires but so far I haven’t found a way to do that.

by Penguin Tail

The FreeTime Parent app certainly has a good amount of control available. However it is extraordinarily unintuitive. As near as I can tell, in order for my kid to be able to listen to music I have to download ANOTHER app (the Alexa app) in order to enable “skills”.

I can control exactly how much time my kid needs to read or listen to audible (and props for those being separate settings) and I can control apps and movies - but I need a totally different app to link my music account? 🧐

Also, it would be really nice if I could either make a separate setting for educational apps or whitelist a couple favorites to have a separate time limit.

by Miaoshu.

AmazonKids is good but has a big problem, say your reading a book, and then after a few pages you exit out of the book, when you click the book again to pick up where you left up , it forgets your place. You have to read a certain amount of pages for it to bookmark it. I was reading this book and was about halfway through, (it was a long book) I read a lot more, and was almost at the end, when I decided to take a break. When I opened the book, half my progress was lost, very annoying

by Dexter And Toby

The content available in AmazonKids is great. 5 stars on that.

However, I really want to use time limits and educational goals to require reading before video watching. We had an old Kindle Fire tablet with FreeTime where that all worked as expected. But with iOS, no matter how I configure things in the parent dashboard, nothing is restricted.

My other complaint is that I have a FreeTime Unlimited family plan but AmazonKids will only let me select one child’s profile. I can see the other profile but I get a confusing error message when trying to select it.

by Barb1751

For young kids, AmazonKids is great. Lots of games, books, ECT for a good price without needing Wifi all the time. What needs major improvement is the parental controls, which is basically the selling point of AmazonKids . 1. The choices of time limits is "weekdays" or "weekends". We all know bedtime for kids is later on Fri/Sat, not Sat/Sun. But AmazonKids doesn't understand that. It considers Friday night a weekday and Sunday night a weekday. 2. The educational goals only allow you to block games until they do it, or just have a goal that means nothing. It would be nice if there was something like "you must complete 15min of reading for every 30min of games" or something similar. Just more goal options. 3. Kids get no warning of when their time limit is close. It just shuts off without warning. A pop-up of "2 minutes left" or something would be reasonable. 4. The phone app for parents will not stay logged in as parents. It always defaults to kid's profile. I use my phone to control their tablets. I don't want to go through having to log off the kids and into the parent dashboard every single time from my phone. 5. I would like even more control over what they can do. Getting the option to block certain things vs. only restricting by age.

by Escoi

It is unlimited books access for girls and adult. The features is that you can read books in any devices just download your unlimited apps and signing. It is portable; whether you travel or lying down as long as your device with you. Price wise, lower could be better since you use it every month . Highly recommended.

by Sleepy Larry

I LOVE LOVE LOVE AmazonKids! It's awesome because of all the books and I'm like a book fanatic... But there's NO SEARCH BAR!!! AAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!
This is kind of annoying because AmazonKids starts me on a series and then- because of NO SEARCH BAR, REMEMBER?- I can't read the rest of the series. The search bar would improve many things. For instance, I would get to read my fave books when I forget them at home. Many people would be able to read books that were on their level of reading, instead of being forced to read children's books, which are on here ALL THE TIME, by the way.
So, search bar plz!
Thx.

by Seattle Mary

The FreeTime app makes it really simple for kids to browse books and shows, and really easy as a parent to know they are not going to land on something inappropriate.
I also like how it gives suggestions of new books and shows for kids to check out. Usually, when my kid gets “bored” with things, I end up doing most of the vetting to make sure the material is appropriate. AmazonKids gives kids a safe venue to check out new things and decide for themselves if they like it or not.

by Lydia1783

Very unimpressed. When using from an iOS device you must have constant internet connection, there is no ability to download videos or books for road or plane trips where connection may not be available.

The free month trial said that subscriptions start at $2.99 for one child with a prime subscription, but it gave me no option to choose my subscription type (and nowhere to view or change it later despite spending way too much time looking for it) and automatically signed me up for the $9.99 up to 4 child non-prime monthly fee.

Do not recommend this subscription even slightly.

by Reviewer1234589

It appears the iOS app doesn’t have a way to disable or remove content native to the Freetime Unlimited app. This is a HUGE dealbreaker for our family. I'm not even sure why Spongebob Squarepants is allowed in the 2-3 year old age range!

It appears there is a way to remove or disable native content using a Kids Kindle, but there is no way to make these changes on an iPad using the Freetime Unlimited app.

I love AmazonKids. It is perfect and exactly what we need for our daughter to have the ability to read purchased Kindle books and to have access to other content, but I will not be keeping our subscription if there is no way to disable this content that is NOT APPROPRIATE!!!

I would be more than happy to contact the developer directly if possible to discuss these issues in more depth.

by Annjelika

I understand that it is great to have options for children but I’m not keeping AmazonKids . I already allow my children viewing time for selected shows but when I want them to read from an app, I want to make sure that reading is the only option; not viewing. There are enough viewing apps - I needed something that wouldn’t distract from reading. Glad we have our library card.

by B1991S

This is an amazing platform for kids. As a teacher, I am enthralled by the vast amount of book choices available on AmazonKids . However, I found it difficult to find books I specifically wanted my child to read because AmazonKids I downloaded onto my phone did not have a search bar. Hopefully, after perusing the settings, I will find a way to add a search bar to look for books. If I had not encountered this issue, I would have absolutely given the program 5 stars.

by Prismviews

My neice loves AmazonKids! It works great on the iPad and has tons of content that keeps her engaged - books, games, videos etc. I see my neice pick it up and use it quite intutively. It helps that the subscription price is light on my wallet as well. Extremely satisfied so far and I hope they keep adding new content for kids.