Apple's new social media age rating questions become required in September 2026

Apple has added social media questions to the age rating questionnaire in App Store Connect, and from September 2026 you will not be able to submit a new app or an update without answering them. Apple has not published a day in September, only the month. The answers live in App Information, not in your build, so this is a form to fill in rather than a release to cut.

Apple's wording, from its developer news post of 9 July 2026:

You can review and answer these questions starting today. As previously shared, beginning in September 2026, responses will be required when submitting new apps or updates to the App Store, or when submitting apps for notarization for alternative distribution.

Note the second half of that sentence. It covers notarization for alternative distribution too, so an app you ship outside the App Store in the EU or Brazil is in scope.

What Apple counts as a social media capability

This is the part worth reading twice, because the definition is broader than the phrase suggests. Apple's text:

A social media capability is defined as the ability to redistribute, amplify, or interact with user-generated content through a social feed or similar discovery method.

Three verbs, and any one of them is enough. Redistribute covers sharing another user's post onward. Amplify covers likes, upvotes, boosts and anything that pushes one user's content in front of others. Interact covers comments and replies.

The qualifier that limits it is "through a social feed or similar discovery method". A support inbox where two people exchange messages is not a feed. A list of everyone's submissions, ranked or ordered so that users discover each other's content, is.

Then the sentence that catches people out:

The Time Allowance category for Social Media is based on whether your app or game offers social media capabilities, regardless of the app category selected in App Store Connect.

Your primary category does not protect you. A fitness app with a public activity feed, a recipe app with comments, a game with a global leaderboard that shows player-created content, a note-taking app with a public gallery: all of those need to be assessed against the definition rather than against the category you picked.

What changes on your product page

Apps with these capabilities will display a new Social Media content descriptor on their App Store product page.

So the answer is public. This is not a private compliance flag, it is a label users will see next to your app, in the same place the other content descriptors appear.

There is one relief valve, and it is specific:

If you indicate that your app or game includes social media capabilities but they are disabled for anyone under 13, it won't be included in the Time Allowance category for Social Media for users under 13.

Read that carefully. It does not remove the descriptor and it does not let you answer no. It says that if the capability is genuinely off for under-13s, the app is not counted in that group's Time Allowance category. If you already gate your social features behind an age check, record how, because that is the answer you will be relying on.

Why Apple is asking

The questions exist to feed a feature announced at WWDC26. Apple's text:

As announced in June, new Time Allowances in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, or later, give parents more flexible ways to manage the time their kids spend in apps across categories, including Entertainment, Games, and Social Media.

So a parent will be able to allot screen time by category, and your questionnaire answer decides which bucket your app falls into. That is a real consequence rather than a paperwork one. If you under-declare, you are misfiling; if you over-declare, your app competes for a budget it did not need to.

Answer it accurately and take the descriptor. Guessing in either direction is worse than the label.

What to do, in order

  1. Open App Store Connect, pick the app, go to App Information, and find the age rating section. The questionnaire is there. Apple's own instruction from the earlier round of age rating changes was to "respond to the new questions in the App Information section of your app in App Store Connect", and that is still where they live.

  2. Read the definition against your actual feature list, not your app's description. Write down every screen where one user can see content another user created. For each, ask whether a user can redistribute it, amplify it, or interact with it, and whether it arrives through a feed or a discovery surface.

  3. Decide the under-13 question honestly. If social features are disabled for under-13s, note the mechanism: an age gate at sign-up, a Declared Age Range check, a parental consent flow, a server-side flag. If they are not disabled, do not claim they are.

  4. Do this for every app in the account, including the dormant ones. The requirement bites when you submit, so an app you have not touched in a year will stop you the moment you want to ship a bug fix. Clearing the questionnaire now costs minutes per app.

  5. Do it before September, not in September. There is no build involved and no review to wait for, which makes this the cheapest deadline on your list. It only becomes expensive if you meet it while trying to ship something else.

The precedent, and why the September date is credible

This is the second stage of a change Apple started earlier. Its Upcoming Requirements page still carries an entry dated 31 January 2026:

Ratings for all apps and games on the App Store have been automatically updated to align with our new age rating system and will be reflected on Apple devices running a minimum of iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe 26, tvOS 26, visionOS 26, and watchOS 26.

Provide responses to the updated age rating questions for each of your apps by January 31, 2026, to avoid an interruption when submitting your app updates in App Store Connect.

"An interruption when submitting" is the phrase to keep in mind. That is what happened in January to developers who ignored the first round, and the September requirement is worded the same way.

Three regional changes landing in the same window

None of these is the September requirement, but they all touch age ratings in the next few months and they are easy to miss.

Republic of Korea, from October 2026. Apple announced on 12 August 2026 that two content descriptors will move from an age rating of All to 12+ for the App Store in Korea: "Infrequent profanity and crude humor" and "Infrequent mature or suggestive themes". If your app carries either descriptor and you ship to Korea, your Korean rating changes without you doing anything.

Republic of Korea, already live. From 12 August 2026, if your app has an official rating from the Game Rating and Administration Committee, you can override your Korean App Store age rating to All, 12+, 15+ or 19+ by supplying your GRAC Rating Classification Number with your next version submission.

Age assurance laws, ongoing. Apple has shipped separate announcements for Texas, Brazil, Australia, Singapore, Utah, Louisiana and Vietnam, several of which involve the Declared Age Range API and the Significant Change API rather than the questionnaire. If you distribute in any of those, the age rating questionnaire is the smaller half of your obligation.

The age rating questionnaire is one of the fields AppSubmit checks before it lets a submission through, on the grounds that a form which blocks a release is worth catching before you press submit rather than after. You can check the same thing yourself in App Information in about a minute per app.

Sources

Last reviewed 2026-08-17. Apple and Google change their rules without notice, so check anything decision-critical against their live documentation.