The question
How do I let a toddler use an iPad without ads or in-app purchases?
iOS can lock the iPad to one app and block purchases outright, and you should turn both on. Here is how, and what it still doesn't fix.
Why this is awkward
A toddler cannot read a paywall, cannot recognise an advert, and taps everything on the screen including the small grey cross in the corner. That makes the ordinary defence — noticing something is a trick — unavailable, and it means an app that is mostly safe is not safe. The failure is not that they spend money. It is that a full-screen advert for another game arrives in the middle of something quiet and the quiet is over.
Apple's Kids Category has real rules behind it, including no behavioural advertising and a gate in front of purchases. What it does not do is stop an app being built around adverts, and plenty of apps aimed squarely at small children sit outside the Kids Category anyway, where those rules do not apply at all.
So the honest first answer is not an app. It is the two settings almost nobody turns on.
Doing it yourself
iOS will lock the iPad to a single app, with a passcode to leave it. That is Guided Access, it is free, it has been there for years, and it is the single most useful thing you can do to a child's iPad. Turn it on in Settings, open whatever app you are handing over, then triple-click the side or Home button to start a session. You can also draw a circle round any part of the screen to make it untappable, which is how you disable a menu button or an advert slot in an app that has one.
Separately, turn purchases off at the device rather than trusting each app. Screen Time will refuse in-app purchases outright, so a tap on one fails rather than asking for a password somebody might type in.
Both together are a genuinely good answer and cost nothing:
Lock the iPad to one app
Settings > Accessibility > Guided Access > On
Set a passcode, then triple-click the side button
in any app to start. Circle any area to disable it.
Refuse purchases at the device
Settings > Screen Time
> Content & Privacy Restrictions > On
> iTunes & App Store Purchases
> In-app Purchases > Don't AllowWhat that costs you
- Guided Access restricts the child, not the app. If what you handed them shows adverts, the adverts are still there — and now they cannot leave the app when one arrives, which is worse rather than better.
- It is per session. You triple-click every time, and a toddler who hands the iPad back and takes it again two hours later gets an unlocked one unless you remember.
- It tells you nothing about what the app does off-screen. Blocking purchases does not block analytics, and the Kids Category permits third-party analytics with consent.
- You still have to find something worth locking them into, which is the actual problem and the one no setting solves.
Or the app that does it
Turn both of those on regardless — they are good settings and they help with every app on the iPad, including this one. Plain and Simple Toddler is what you lock the iPad to afterwards.
It is five activities a small child can work alone: a flip book they turn with a tap, colouring in either colour or plain black-and-white, a sticker page with nothing to finish, matching with no wrong answers on the board, and tracing that never tells them they got it wrong. There is no score, no timer, and nothing to fail.
There are no adverts, nothing to buy at any point, and no links out of the app — so there is nothing for a tap to land on that you did not intend. Nothing about your child is recorded: no account, no analytics, no third-party code, and no network request of the app's own. The settings live on your device and in your own iCloud, and there is no server of mine for any of it to reach, because there isn't one.
It also has a lock of its own, and the app page is honest about the limits of that lock — it keeps a small child in, and it is not a defence against a determined older one. Guided Access is still the stronger tool and the two work together.