App Store Age Ratings: 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ and 18+ Explained for Developers

Every app on the App Store carries an age rating, and the scale now has five steps: 4+, 9+, 13+, 16+ and 18+. You do not pick the rating. You answer a questionnaire in App Store Connect about what your app contains and what it lets people do, and Apple turns those answers into a rating for each country or region, following the tables on Apple's age ratings values and definitions page. People search for the same system as Apple age ratings, app age ratings and App Store age restrictions.

The scale changed on July 24, 2025. Apple's announcement of the updated age ratings added 13+, 16+ and 18+ to the existing 4+ and 9+, which retired 12+ and 17+ on devices running iOS 26 and the matching releases. The same post added required questions about in app controls, capabilities, medical or wellness topics and violent themes, and asked developers to answer them by January 31, 2026. A second round followed on July 9, 2026, when Apple added questions about social media capabilities. Answers to those have been required with every submission since September 2026.

Three things make the rating matter more than it used to. Parents' Screen Time limits are built on it, so a rating above a child's limit hides your app from the store's main tabs for that child. Several regions attach legal weight to it: since February 24, 2026 Apple blocks downloads of 18+ apps in Australia, Brazil and Singapore unless the account holder is confirmed as an adult. And App Review treats a wrong answer as a guideline problem, because Guideline 2.3.6 of the App Review Guidelines asks you to answer the questions honestly.

This page covers the current tiers, the full questionnaire, the steps in App Store Connect, the regional ratings, the rules that sit next to ratings, Apple's age assurance tools, the laws behind them, and Google Play content ratings for comparison. It is a summary for developers and marketers. It is not legal advice, and Apple's pages are the authority. Everything below was read on Apple's, Google's, IARC's and the named law firms' pages on October 13, 2026.

Apple did the mapping for you. The July 2025 announcement says ratings for all apps and games were automatically updated to align with the new system, and the table above shows where each existing answer landed. You did not need to resubmit to get a 13+, 16+ or 18+ label. What Apple asked for was answers to the questions that did not exist before.

People on older systems still see the old scale. Apple's reference page says the rating for an app may vary with the OS version, and App Store Connect shows what earlier systems display in a section named Operating Systems Earlier than Version 26. For a while your app has two labels: 13+ on a phone running iOS 26 or later, and 12+ on one that has not updated.

That settles the common search for 12+ vs 13+. They are the same answers under two generations of the scale, so a move from 12+ to 13+ is a relabel and does not mean your content was judged again. The 17+ question has a different answer. Apps whose only 17+ trigger was an in app browser, frequent medical information or frequent mature themes now show 16+. Apps with gambling, or with frequent sexual content, realistic violence or substance references, show 18+.

One regional footnote belongs here. On the older systems, Apple's page says an app rated 17+ shows as 18+ on the App Store in France, as required by the national frequency agency (ANFR). On version 26 systems France uses the global scale.

The July 2025 post names four areas of new required questions: in app controls, capabilities, medical or wellness topics, and violent themes. Set Apple's old and new tables side by side and the additions are easy to find. The control questions are parental controls and age assurance. The capability questions are user generated content, messaging and chat, and advertising, next to the older question about web access. Health or wellness topics joined the medical question, and guns or other weapons joined the violence questions.

The same post carries a reminder that is easy to miss. You must consider how every feature affects how often sensitive content appears, and Apple names AI assistants and chatbot functionality as examples. If your app can generate text or images on request, the frequency answers have to cover what it can produce, and the app remains subject to the guidelines on objectionable content and user generated content.

Social media came next. In the July 2026 post Apple defines a social media capability as the ability to redistribute, amplify or interact with user generated content through a social feed or a similar discovery method. A yes has three effects: the app gets a minimum rating of 13+, its product page shows a Social Media content descriptor, and it lands in the Social Media category of Time Allowances, a parental control in iOS 27, iPadOS 27 and macOS 27. That category follows your answer and ignores the store category you chose.

There is a middle option. If you state that social media features are disabled for anyone under 13, the app stays out of the Social Media Time Allowance category for those users, and Apple requires that you use the Declared Age Range API, at a minimum, to check age ranges. The questions opened on July 9, 2026. Since September 2026 answers are required to submit a new app or an update to the App Store, or to submit an app for notarization for alternative distribution.

A frequent answer on medical or treatment information has a second consequence. Since March 26, 2026, Apple's post on regulated medical device apps requires those apps, and any app with Health & Fitness or Medical as a category, to declare whether they are a regulated medical device before they can be distributed in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or the United States. New apps need the declaration now. Existing apps have until early 2027, after which Apple says updates cannot be submitted without it.

To change a rating you change answers. Apple's help page gives the path: click App Information in the sidebar, click Edit at the top of the page, and go through the same dialog. The new calculated rating appears in the last step before you save.

The override only goes up. Choose Override to Higher Age Rating and pick a rating above the calculated one. The App Store then displays the rating you picked, while the content descriptions on the product page still reflect your questionnaire answers. Apple makes the override mandatory in one case: if your license agreement sets a minimum age above the calculated rating, you must override to a rating that matches it. The override applies in every region where the app is available and can resolve to a different value where a region has its own scale.

No setting lowers a rating. The way down is to remove the content or the capability and answer again, and Guideline 2.3.6 expects the new answers to be true.

Whether a change needs a new version is something Apple answers in pieces. Apple's table of required, localizable and editable properties marks the fields that can be edited at any time without submitting a new version, and Age Rating is not ticked in that column. Apple's November 4, 2025 post about Texas adds that when a developer updates an app's age rating, the rating is updated on all user devices once the version is live. Two regional changes are explicit: a Korean rating override travels with your next version submission, and a Brazilian betting license is verified only when a new version is submitted. Plan a rating change as part of a release.

Families notice a change. That Texas post notes that state law treats a change in an app's age rating as a significant change that needs fresh parental consent, and Apple's Ask to Buy support page tells parents they may be notified when an app has an updated age rating. Change the rating for a reason, and say what changed in the release notes. Our app release notes examples show how to word that in a line.

The rating appears on your product page with details on how often certain content appears, as Apple's page on age appropriate experiences describes. Since the 2025 update the product page also shows content labels for what you declared: parental controls, age assurance, user generated content, messaging and advertising, and since 2026 a Social Media descriptor. The Age Suitability URL, if you gave one, sits with the age rating details.

Parents set a ceiling. Apple's parental controls guide describes Content & Privacy Restrictions, where a parent selects a type of content such as apps and chooses a specific age rating, or a setting like Don't Allow, Unrated or Allow All. It says many of these settings are applied automatically based on the child's age. Apple's June 2025 announcement on child safety tools states what that does to discovery: when content restrictions are set for a child, apps rated above the limit do not appear in the Today, Games and Apps tabs or in editorial stories.

Ask to Buy works apart from the rating. Apple's Ask to Buy page says a child with it turned on must ask permission to download or buy any app regardless of the app's age rating, and that in some states, countries or regions it is on by default and cannot be turned off for anyone under 18. The parental controls guide adds that it is on by default for children under 13.

A rating above the limit is not final. From iOS 26 a child can request an exception for an app that exceeds the restriction, and the parent can approve it and remove access later. Apple's age assurance Q&A confirms it with an example: a parent can still let a child under 13 download and use an app rated 13+.

Teens get defaults too. The 2025 announcement says accounts for ages 13 to 17 start with age appropriate protections that use the more granular ratings, whether or not the account was set up as a Child Account. With Time Allowances, parents can budget time by category: Entertainment and Games follow the category you chose in App Store Connect, and Social Media follows your questionnaire answer.

In three regions the rating is a hard gate. Apple's February 24, 2026 post says the App Store blocks users in Australia, Brazil and Singapore from downloading apps rated 18+ unless they have been confirmed to be adults, and that the App Store performs this confirmation by itself.

If you came here as a parent asking how to change the app age rating limit on an iPhone, the steps are in the next section.

A rating describes the app. Age assurance describes the person. Apple's position in its age assurance Q&A is that developers are responsible for their own age restrictions, and that in regions where the law requires it, Apple confirms an account holder's age and shares an age category with your app.

The main tool is the Declared Age Range API, available on iOS 26, iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 or later. Your app asks for an age range by passing age gates (Apple's sample uses 13, 15 and 18), the system shows its own sheet, and the person, or a parent for a child in a Family Sharing group, decides whether to share. You receive a range with a lower and an upper bound and a declaration of how the age was established. The child's actual birth date is not provided, and the system may override your age gates to match local regulations.

Apple's Q&A answers the questions developers ask most. The API is available worldwide, and outside the regulated regions people choose whether to share. Nothing in the App Review process changed because of age assurance. An 18+ rating does not exempt you: where a law requires it, you still check age with the API. And to use everything Apple has released, you build against the iOS 26.2 and iPadOS 26.2 SDKs or later with Xcode 26.2 or later.

This section is about Android. Google Play does not run one scale of its own the way Apple does. Google's content ratings policy says every app must carry a rating from the International Age Rating Coalition (IARC), that apps without a content rating are removed from the Play Store, and that misrepresenting content can lead to removal or suspension.

You get the rating from one questionnaire in Play Console. Google's help page on content ratings gives the path: open App content under Policy, click Start, enter an email address that IARC uses for correspondence, select a category, answer the questions, review the calculated ratings on the Summary page and submit. One submission returns a rating from each participating authority. You retake the questionnaire when content or features change in a way that affects your answers.

IARC is a coalition of rating boards. IARC's description of how its system works says the questionnaire assigns an age rating, content descriptors and interactive elements by region, that the boards monitor assigned ratings and send corrections to storefronts, and that a developer answers once and can reuse the certificate ID on other IARC storefronts. IARC's FAQ adds that ratings are issued immediately, that the service is free to developers, and that you can request a rating check if a result looks wrong.

Google adds a second declaration with no direct twin on Apple's side: target audience and content. If any target age group includes children, the Families policy applies, including the rule to serve ads to children only through ad SDKs that have self certified for the Families program. Google also uses ratings as a hard gate. In the European Economic Area, Australia, Brazil, Singapore, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, users determined to be minors cannot acquire mature content such as apps rated 18+.

For age signals, Google's counterpart to Apple's API is the Play Age Signals API, in beta on a page last updated July 20, 2026. It returns signals for users in Brazil since March 17, 2026 and for eligible users in Texas who created their accounts after May 28, 2026. Its terms bar using the data for advertising, marketing, user profiling or analytics.

A higher rating shrinks the audience that can find you inside the store, and it also limits promotion. Start with your own store assets. Under Guideline 2.3.8 the icon, screenshots and previews must stay suitable for a 4+ audience whatever the app is rated, and those are the images people reuse in ads and social posts.

Apple's own ad product reads the rating. The audience settings page for Apple Ads says no ads are shown to Apple Accounts registered to minors under 13 or to Managed Apple Accounts, that the youngest age you can target is 18 in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean (19, 20 or 21 in some other countries), and that ads for apps with a 15+ or higher rating serve only to users 18 or older. That page still uses a 15+ threshold, which is not a tier on today's global scale, so expect an app rated 16+ or 18+ to reach adults only on Apple Ads.

On badges the answer is short. We found no mention of age ratings on Apple's marketing guidelines page, which covers the Download on the App Store badge, device images and wording. Nothing there puts an age rating on the badge or beside it, so use the badge as supplied. Our summary of the App Store marketing guidelines has the sizes and clear space. Google differs: its help page asks you to include the assigned rating when you advertise the app in each region.

Say the age limit where Apple gives you room. Apple's December 2025 post on Australia suggests the app description for age information that the rest of the product page does not capture, such as a minimum age for accounts. Our App Store description generator drafts within Apple's limits, and the App Store character counter checks the length.

The rating is one input among many in store visibility. The wider picture is in our guides to App Store optimization and how to market an app, with current numbers on the store in our App Store statistics.

Spreadcast does not set or check age ratings. It is app marketing automation for social media: you paste your App Store link once, it reads your public App Store listing every day, and it designs a post for each update, each new 5 star review and each rating milestone, then publishes it to 11 networks: Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, plus YouTube for video posts.

One word clash to clear up: a rating milestone there means star ratings, such as reaching 1,000 ratings or a 4.8 average. It has nothing to do with the age rating on this page. For the star kind, see our guide on how to get App Store reviews.

The connection to this page is practical. Spreadcast builds each post from your icon and your store screenshots, the same assets Guideline 2.3.8 holds to a 4+ standard, so the images that passed App Review are the ones your posts show. You choose whether every post waits for one tap of approval or goes out by itself. The free plan drafts every post for download, and Pro at $29 a month flat includes the designs, a caption for each network and the publishing.