How to Cancel a Coloring App Subscription

If you’ve ever gone looking for the cancel button in an app and found only a “pause,” a discount offer, or a link that goes nowhere, you’ve run into exactly the kind of design the FTC has been cracking down on. Its Click-to-Cancel rule requires that ending a subscription be no harder than starting one — and the agency has already enforced this against a children’s app: ABCmouse was ordered to pay $10 million in refunds after regulators found it made signing up easy and cancelling deliberately difficult.

The good news is that cancelling a coloring app subscription rarely needs to involve the app itself at all. Both Apple and Google let you manage and cancel any subscription from one central place on the device, regardless of what the app’s own settings menu does or doesn’t offer.

How to Cancel on iPhone or iPad

1. Open Settings, tap your name at the top, then tap Subscriptions.
2. Find the coloring app in the list and tap it.
3. Tap Cancel Subscription (if you don’t see this option, the subscription is already cancelled or not currently active).

You can also get here through the App Store app: tap your profile icon in the top corner, then Subscriptions. Either path works — this is a device/account-level setting, not something the app itself controls.

How to Cancel on Android

1. Open the Google Play Store app.
2. Tap your profile icon in the top right, then Payments & subscriptions → Subscriptions.
3. Find the coloring app, tap it, then tap Cancel subscription and follow the prompts.

As with iPhone, this list reflects every active subscription tied to your Google account — you don’t need to dig through the coloring app’s own settings to find it.

If Cancellation Isn’t Working

If you cancel through your device’s subscription list but the app still shows a locked/paid state past your billing period, or if you were charged after cancelling, that’s worth escalating rather than assuming it will sort itself out:

• Apple: submit a request at reportaproblem.apple.com — this is also the right place to request a refund for an accidental or unauthorized charge.
• Google: request a refund or report an issue through Google Play’s order history.
• If neither resolves it, you can file a complaint with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov — this is the same channel that has fed into the agency’s recent enforcement actions against subscription dark patterns.

Before You Subscribe

A few minutes of setup can mean you rarely need any of the above:

• Before entering payment details for a coloring app, check whether it uses a parental gate — if a child can reach the purchase screen without a deliberate adult step, an accidental subscription is more likely in the first place.
• If you want to prevent purchases entirely rather than manage them after the fact, our guide to stopping accidental in-app purchases walks through disabling in-app purchases at the device level.
• Note the renewal date somewhere you’ll actually see it — most unwanted charges we hear about aren’t failed cancellations, they’re subscriptions nobody remembered were running.

Our Take

Cancelling should never require finding a specific button inside the app that sold you the subscription in the first place — your phone’s own subscription list works regardless of how any individual coloring app has designed (or hidden) its own cancel flow, and it’s worth knowing that before you need it.

Sources: FTC Is Escalating Scrutiny of Dark Patterns, Children’s Privacy (Bloomberg Law), Dark Patterns 2026: The FTC’s New Click-to-Cancel Rule (Cookie-Script), Manage or cancel your subscriptions (Apple Support), Cancel a Google subscription (Google Play Help)