The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for users to find apps and a great business opportunity for developers. As children use our products and services to navigate the digital world and connect with family and friends, Apple platforms and the apps you build have become essential to many families. We hold apps for kids and user-generated content and interactions to the highest standards. We want to remind you of the tools, resources, and requirements to help keep users safe in your app so we can continue to provide safe experiences for families together.
Made for kids
If you have an app intended for children, we encourage you to use the Kids category, which is designed to help families find age-appropriate content and apps that protect children’s data and meet additional safeguards for purchases and permissions. , for camera, location, etc.).
Learn more about building apps for kids.
Parental controls
Your app’s age rating is integrated into our operating systems and works with parental control features like Screen Time. Additionally, by asking to buy, children send a request to Family Organizer when they want to buy or download a new app or in-app purchase. You can also use the configurable settings framework to ensure that the content in your app complies with any content restrictions set by the parent. The Screen Time API is a powerful tool for parental control and productivity apps to help parents manage how kids use their devices. Learn more about the tools we provide to help parents know and feel better about what kids are doing on their devices.
Sensitive and inappropriate content
Applications with user-generated content and interactions must include a set of safeguards to protect users, including a mechanism to filter objectionable content from being posted to the application, the ability to support and block reporting of objectionable content and timely responses to threats. Abusive users. Apps that contain ads should include a way for users to report inappropriate and age-inappropriate ads.
iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, and watchOS 10 introduce the ability to detect and warn users about nudity before displaying images and videos on the screen. A sensitive content analysis framework uses on-device technology to detect sensitive content in your application. Customize your app experience to properly handle sensitive content found for users with connection security or sensitive content warning enabled.
Support users
Users have several ways to report problems with an app, such as Problem Reporting. Users can provide app feedback to other users and developers by writing their own reviews. Users can report concerns with other personal user reviews. To improve the security of your app, you should closely monitor your user reviews and have the ability to address concerns directly. Additionally, if you believe another app presents a trust or security risk or violates our policies, you can share details with Apple for investigation.
These user review tools are critical to informing our work to keep the App Store safe. Apple deploys machine learning, automation, and human review to monitor abuse and report issues submitted through user reviews. We address concerns such as reports of fraud and scams, support violations, inappropriate content and advertising, privacy and security concerns, objectionable content, and child exploitation. and use techniques such as semi-supervised relational annotation (CorEx) models and large-scale language models based on transformers (BERT) that are trained specifically to identify these topics. Suggested topics will be escalated to our app review team, who will further investigate the app and take action if violations of our guidelines are found.
We believe we have a shared mission with you as developers to create a safe and trusted experience for families, and we look forward to continuing that important work. Here are some resources you may find helpful:
Sensitive content Analytical framework
About ratings, reviews, and responses
Report the associated trust and security risk Another app
Find out about ScreenTime Framework
Learn about building apps For children