Surprisingly poor Nintendo experience...

For better or worse, we bit the bullet in 2024 and got our kids each a Nintendo Switch Lite for their birthdays.

I have the app on my phone which allows me to set daily time limits, disable capabilities around interacting with people online etc. Those aspects have been working well so far but over Christmas it occurred to me how poor the experience is regarding buying games through the eShop.

In case you don't know, how it basically works is I have a Nintendo account and from that account, I've set up individual accounts for my kids. This allows their game data (time played, friends etc) to be assigned to them, not me. But, when it comes to purchasing games, the buck still stops with me and I have to authorise any purchases by way of entering my password on their device.

This is where I hit a wall.

I use a password generator and anyone who's ever used one knows they're not the easiest thing to type in manually, but the Nintendo eShop requires it and I so often make mistakes when typing out forcing me to go through it over and over until I get it right. It makes for an extremely painful experience.

So my question is: why can't purchases by authorised through the app on my phone?

My kids don't know my phone passcode so they can't just get into it if they felt like it and the app could offer an "Authorise with FaceID" feature which would make the process so much slicker and pain-free.

I can't comment on any potential security issues which are opened up by this, I'm not an expert. I'm just spit-balling a thought which occurred to me as a user of the product over the Christmas period.

With their next device on the horizon, I can't imagine Nintendo would roll anything like this out now, even if anyone there actually did read this, I just wanted to get it off my chest.