iOS 27 Age Rating Questionnaire: What Every App Owner Needs to Do

You went to push a small update — a typo fix, a new subscription screen, nothing dramatic — and App Store Connect stopped you cold. The rating you set two years ago isn't valid anymore, and you can't submit until you answer twenty-something new questions about content you never thought of your app as having.

Welcome to the age rating questionnaire as it stands on the day iOS 27 ships. Apple opened Xcode 27 Release Candidate submissions on September 10, iOS 27 shipped September 14, and the same week Apple began enforcing a new required block of social media capability questions on top of the questionnaire that was already overhauled in July 2025. If you own an app, you'll hit it on your next release. Here's what it asks now, why the answers matter more than they used to, and where small teams are getting in trouble.

What the questionnaire actually asks

The pre-2025 form was a short checklist — violence, sexual content, alcohol references — with a "none / infrequent or mild / frequent or intense" toggle per row. The July 2025 overhaul (compliance deadline January 31, 2026) widened the surface and added capability, in-app control, and medical/wellness questions. September 2026 layered on social media capability questions to feed iOS 27's Time Allowances. Today, expect to answer for:

• Age-restricted content — violence (cartoon, fantasy, realistic, graphic), sexual or suggestive themes, nudity, profanity, and horror, each rated separately for frequency and intensity.
• Chat and communication — user messaging, moderation, contact discovery, and voice/video calls.
• Mature themes — drug and alcohol references, tobacco or vaping, criminal activity, and self-harm or eating-disorder references.
• Gambling — simulated gambling, real-money contests, loot boxes, and prize-linked mechanics.
• Medical and health — dosing advice, diagnostic suggestions, mental-health support, and reproductive-health content.
• In-app purchases — type, ease of access, and whether children can trigger a purchase without an adult prompt.
• Integrated web content — Safari views, WebViews you control, and curated allowlists.
• UGC moderation — a full sub-form: pre-publication review, post-publication review, automated filters, reporting, and staffing.

Each row still uses "none," "infrequent or mild," and "frequent or intense." The middle option is where most apps live and where most owners guess wrong.

Time Allowances and Screen Time: why parents just became your rating audience

The reason the questionnaire got longer is that the answers do more work now. On iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27, Screen Time reads your rating directly and applies it to a parent's controls without the parent configuring anything app by app. One dial for the family, enforced across every managed device.

Concretely, your rating and capabilities now determine:

• Whether the app is launchable at all on a device with a content-age ceiling below its rating.
• Which Time Allowance category counts the app — Entertainment, Games, or the new Social Media bucket driven by the social media capability answer.
• Whether the app carries the new Social Media content descriptor on its App Store product page.
• How the app is filtered in App Store search for accounts under thirteen and other age ceilings.

Under-rate to reach more devices and Apple can (and now does) pull the app until you resubmit honestly. Over-rate defensively and you quietly disappear from every device with any Screen Time restriction on — after a few years of Apple pushing families to enable the defaults, that's not a small pool.

The rating used to be a label on the store page. On iOS 27 it's a permission bit the operating system checks every time a kid taps your icon.

What each rating tier looks like on iOS 27 with Screen Time on

This is the mental model we use with clients staring at a middle-tier answer. The right column is default Screen Time behavior on a device with the age ceiling at the row's tier or lower.

Notice where a social media capability lands: 13+ minimum, unless those features are disabled for users under 13. Unrestricted web access lands at 16+. Those are the biggest gotchas we're seeing with 2026 submissions.

What's most likely to trip you up

Every ambiguous answer has a safe reading and an aggressive one. Here are the rows catching small teams:

• Unmoderated user content. If users can post anything other users see — comments, profiles, photos, shared journal entries — and you don't pre-review it, you have unmoderated UGC. Post-hoc reporting doesn't count.
• Integrated Safari views. Opening a link with SFSafariViewController or WKWebView means arbitrary web content. Answer honestly even if you "only ever" link to your own docs.
• "Occasional" versus "frequent." Apple's guidance: anything a user can encounter in a normal session counts as frequent. A curated feed with a mild reference likely meets the frequent bar.
• Contact discovery. Surfacing other real users by name, phone, or location triggers additional questions and can push your rating up a tier.
• Loot-box mechanics that aren't called loot boxes. Randomized rewards paid for with premium currency count, even if you call them "packs" or "chests."
• Health and dosing. A calm meditation app is fine. Anything suggesting a dosage, diagnosis, or course of action is a different tier and often a different review path.

What happens if you get it wrong

Under-rating is the loud failure mode: a misrated app gets pulled, users lose access, and you resubmit with honest answers. Slower approvals for a couple of releases afterward are normal. Same enforcement pattern we wrote about in Apple's low-value app purge — the rule was there, but now the enforcement matches the rule.

Over-rating is the quiet failure mode, and it's worse because you never see the users you lost. An 18+ utility app doesn't just skip family devices; it skips managed workplace deployments, education MDM profiles, and every household that clicked through Screen Time onboarding without changing anything. Over time, that's a real slice of the installable base.

One cross-reference worth flagging: Apple's August 18, 2026 EU business terms update consolidated alternative-distribution agreements and moved to a Core Technology Commission on digital sales. Notarization for alternative distribution didn't go away, and the same September 2026 questionnaire requirement (including the social media capability questions) applies to notarization submissions. Same Screen Time behaviors apply on iOS 27 devices — no "sideload around the rating" path. For the wider platform context, our WWDC 2026 recap walks through what shipped alongside this.

A sensible playbook for your next submission

If you'd rather not guess, here's the short version we use internally:

• Open the actual current build on a device. Write down every input, feed, chat surface, purchase flow, and outbound link. That list is the questionnaire.
• Screenshot the form before you answer it — you'll want the paper trail for next release.
• Answer frequency and moderation the way an outside reviewer would after ten minutes with the app, not the way you'd defend them.
• If you have chat or UGC, decide now whether you moderate pre- or post-publication and document the policy at your support URL.
• If you sell IAP, verify the family-approval prompt fires on a child account and screenshot the receipt for review.
• If you manage a portfolio, roll the new answers through one app first and wait for it to clear review before touching the rest.

Where people go wrong (and when to call a pro)

If you're shipping an update this fall and the rating matters, we've done this on live apps and we're happy to sit with you for an hour and go row by row. Cheaper than the resubmission cycle.

Frequently asked questions