A cracked screen protector, a sticky layer of apple juice in the charging port, and a six-year-old who has somehow found the one app that still has in-app purchases switched on. That’s the real test of any kid’s tablet, not the benchmark chart. We get asked constantly about Android tablets vs iPads for kids: which is the better buy for a child aged roughly five to twelve, a cheaper Android setup, or is it worth stretching the budget for Apple’s ecosystem? Our answer, after years of fielding these questions from parents, is more nuanced than most retail staff will give you, and it comes with one opinion we know won’t please everyone.
The real question parents are asking
Nobody actually wants to know which tablet has the sharper screen or the faster chip. What parents want to know is whether the thing will survive being dropped on tiles, whether they can stop their kid buying $4.99 worth of Robux at 7am on a Tuesday, and whether the tablet will still get security updates in three years when it gets handed down to a younger sibling.
That last point matters more than most buying guides admit. A tablet that stops receiving security patches is a tablet you shouldn’t hand to a child, full stop, because it’s increasingly exposed to the sort of scams and malicious apps the Australian Cyber Security Centre warns about in its home user guidance. Software support length is the single biggest thing we weigh when we’re asked to recommend a kid’s tablet, well ahead of screen resolution or storage.
It’s also the thing almost nobody checks before buying. We’ve lost count of the number of times a parent has told us their eighteen-month-old tablet simply stopped offering updates, with no warning on the box that this was coming.
Where iPads still win
We’ll say it plainly: Apple’s iPad, including the entry-level model, remains the easiest tablet to hand to a child and walk away from. Screen Time controls are built into the operating system, they’re genuinely effective, and Apple has committed to long software support windows that mean a base iPad bought today is still a reasonable bet in four or five years’ time. Apple’s own Screen Time support documentation covers content restrictions, app limits and downtime scheduling in more depth than most Android equivalents, and in our experience it’s harder for a determined nine-year-old to talk their way around.
The build quality is also just better at the lower end. The aluminium back survives the kind of drops that would crack a plastic-backed Android tablet, and resale value on used iPads holds up remarkably well on Gumtree and Facebook Marketplace, which matters when your kid outgrows it or the family upgrades to something newer.
There’s a quieter advantage too: the App Store’s parental approval system for purchases and downloads is, in our experience, more consistent than the equivalent Google Play family approval flow. If a nine-year-old asks to download a new game, a parent gets a clear notification and a single approve-or-deny choice. It sounds small. It isn’t, at 8pm on a school night.
Where Android makes more sense
Here’s the mildly contrarian bit: for a lot of Australian families, we think a mid-range Android tablet is actually the smarter buy for a child under about eight, and we’d argue that against the prevailing “just get an iPad” advice you’ll hear in most forums and from most sales staff.
The reason is blunt. Young kids destroy tablets. They sit on them, they take them into the bath despite every warning, they leave them face-down on gravel in the driveway. Spending the better part of $600 to $900 on an entry iPad for a five-year-old, when a $250 to $350 Android tablet from a brand like Samsung or Lenovo with a dedicated kids’ mode does almost everything that age group needs, feels like money better spent on the inevitable replacement unit, or on swimming lessons.
Samsung’s Kids Mode and the Google Family Link app, which works across most Android tablets, both do a competent job of locking down app access, screen time and purchases. It’s not quite as polished as Apple’s version, and we’ll admit some menus feel like they were designed by three different teams who didn’t talk to each other, but it’s more than good enough for a child who mostly wants to watch ABC iview, play a handful of approved games, and occasionally video call grandparents.
Software support: the part nobody asks about
This is where the Android side gets genuinely messy, and it’s the main reason we hesitate before recommending the cheapest option in a big-box aisle. Budget Android tablets, the sub-$200 ones sold under house brands, often get one major software update if you’re lucky, sometimes none at all. That’s a real problem for a device a child might use for three or four years, because an unpatched tablet connected to home Wi-Fi is a soft target, and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has been clear in its guidance that outdated software is one of the most common entry points for the kind of data exposure that ends up in a notifiable breach.
Stick to tablets from brands that publish an actual update commitment, Samsung’s mid-range Galaxy Tab A series being the most common sensible pick in this price bracket in Australia, and check how many years of security patches are promised before you buy, not after the fact when it’s too late to return it.
What to check before you buy
We’d look at three things on the box or product page before anything else: the promised years of security updates, whether parental controls are built into the operating system or rely on a separate app that can simply be uninstalled by a tech-savvy nine-year-old, and whether the charging port is the same USB-C standard as everything else in the house, because losing yet another proprietary cable is nobody’s idea of fun on a Sunday night before school.
The e-reader alternative nobody considers
For families mainly trying to get a reluctant reader off a phone, we’d gently suggest looking sideways at a dedicated e-reader rather than another tablet. We’ve covered this ground in our e-readers compared guide, and the appeal for kids specifically is that there’s no app store rabbit hole to fall down, no YouTube autoplay at 9pm, just books and maybe a basic built-in dictionary. It won’t replace a tablet for schoolwork or video calls, but as a second device for a bookish ten-year-old it’s hard to beat on battery life alone, often running for weeks rather than hours between charges.
Connectivity and household Wi-Fi
Whichever platform you land on, a kid’s tablet is only as good as the home network backing it, particularly if there’s video calling, cloud saves or school portals involved. If your household has dead zones where a tablet drops out mid-video-call in the back bedroom, it’s worth sorting the network before blaming the device itself. We’ve gone through the options in our mesh Wi-Fi systems guide, and for a typical three or four bedroom Australian home a basic mesh kit solves more real-world frustration than any tablet upgrade will.
It’s also worth tightening the router itself while you’re at it, since a tablet with weak parental controls is less of a worry if the router is already filtering things at the network level. Our home router security checklist covers the basics in about fifteen minutes, and it’s time well spent before handing any device to a child, Android or iPad.
Tradies, travellers and hand-me-downs
A few buyer types come up often enough that they deserve a direct answer rather than a general one.
For travelling families, we’d lean Android, specifically a tablet with expandable storage via a microSD card, because downloading a season of kids’ shows before a long Qantas or Jetstar flight is still easier when you’re not fighting iCloud storage limits and upgrade prompts. For households that already run entirely on Apple gear, an entry iPad genuinely does integrate more smoothly, shared family purchases, AirDrop, FaceTime with grandparents who already have an iPhone, and that convenience is worth paying for if the budget allows it.
For families planning to hand a tablet down through two or three kids, buy higher up the range than feels necessary for the youngest child. A tablet bought for a six-year-old today is often still in service when they’re nine and want to do actual homework on it, and underpowered budget units slow down badly once a couple of years of app updates and background processes pile on. It’s the same false economy we see tradies fall into with the cheapest work phone on the shelf, and it rarely ends well.
Our verdict on Android tablets vs iPads for kids
If budget isn’t the constraint and the family already leans Apple, buy the entry iPad and don’t overthink it. The parental controls are better out of the box, the resale value is strong, and it’ll outlast a child’s interest in whatever app is trending this month anyway.
But if you’re buying for a child under eight, replacing a device that’s likely to meet an untimely end at the bottom of a swimming pool, or trying to keep costs sane across two or three kids, we reckon a well-chosen mid-range Android tablet with a genuine update commitment is the more sensible call, not the compromise choice it’s often painted as in glossier buying guides. Check the update policy before the price tag, set up Family Link or Kids Mode properly on day one, and don’t buy the cheapest unit in the aisle just because it has a cartoon sticker stuck on the box.
For older kids heading toward their first phone, it’s worth reading up on the eSafety Commissioner’s guidance on age-appropriate device use, particularly with the social media minimum age now in force. A tablet, chosen properly, is often the gentler first step before that conversation becomes unavoidable.
— Priya Raman, Reviews Editor, Tech Geek
Featured image: AI-generated illustration.
