Fix Your App Store Age Ratings Before July 18, 2026

Almost 1 month from now, your app's product page in two countries changes without you touching a thing.

If you've shipped to Australia or Vietnam, this matters. If you haven't looked at your App Store Connect age rating questionnaire since last year, it matters more.

Here's the take, plainly: this is not a big engineering job. It's a one-hour audit that, if you skip it, can downgrade your discoverability or pull your app from a storefront entirely. The teams who'll get hurt are the ones who delegated the questionnaire to whoever was filling out App Store Connect at 11pm during the original submission and never opened it again.

What's actually changing on July 18, 2026

Two separate moves, same day.

Australia. Apple confirmed that starting July 18, 2026, age ratings on the App Store will be updated in Australia and Vietnam, and the 15+ age rating will no longer be available on the App Store in Australia. Apps currently rated 15+ with certain content descriptors will be updated to 16+.

If you've got a social app, a browser-based product, or anything with randomized purchases or open chat, this is you. Many social, browser-based, and gaming apps currently rely on the 15+ category in Australia, especially apps that include randomized purchases or open internet access.

Vietnam. Until now, Vietnamese App Store ratings followed the global tier. After July 18, they don't. To align with Article 38 of Vietnam Decree 147, apps available on the App Store in Vietnam will require a region-specific age rating. Based on your age rating questionnaire responses in App Store Connect, your app will receive one of four ratings (00+ all ages, 12+, 16+, or 18+) which will appear on its product page in Vietnam.

Apple has said additional details will land in App Store Connect on July 18 itself, which means the window to clean up your questionnaire is now, not after the change goes live.

Why a "small" rating change is actually a growth problem

A bump from 15+ to 16+ in Australia sounds like nothing. It isn't.

Age ratings filter discovery. Parental controls block downloads above a rating threshold. Carrier-bundled "family plans" in some markets use the rating to decide what shows up in their curated stores. School-issued iPads and education-managed device fleets respect the rating too.

If your app jumps from 12+ to 16+ because a content descriptor got flagged in the new questionnaire, the addressable market on that device shrinks. Quietly. With no email from Apple beyond the original notice.

Vietnam is the harder one. Going from a globally-aligned rating to one of four region-specific tiers means your product page in Hanoi could show a different label than the one in Sydney, Singapore, or San Francisco. If the new rating reads 18+ when the rest of your store shows 12+, your conversion rate in that market will drop and you won't know why for a quarter.

The five-step audit (do this once, you're done)

This is what we'd do for any client of ours shipping to either market this month. Run it yourself in under an hour.

1.     Open App Store Connect, go to each app's "App Information," find the Age Rating row. Click into the questionnaire. Don't trust what's filled in. Read every question.

2.     Re-answer every question against today's app, not last year's app. New chat feature? User-generated content added? Web browser embedded? A loot-box mechanic that was a "maybe" at launch and is now live? Each of these has a content descriptor attached.

3.     Pay special attention to the Australia-specific descriptors. Ratings vary by country, with specific rules for Australia (e.g., 15+ for loot boxes), Brazil, and Korea. If your app touched any of those areas and you previously landed on 15+ in Australia, expect 16+ after July 18 unless you adjust content.

4.     Decide whether to override. Apple lets you set a higher rating than the questionnaire suggests if your terms of service require it. If your EULA says 13+ and Apple's questionnaire spits out 9+, you can override up. You can't override down.

5.     Save, submit, and screenshot. Keep the dated screenshot in your team's compliance folder. If a downgrade happens later, you have a record of what was answered when.

That's it. No code change. No release. No App Store review queue.

What the questionnaire actually asks for now

This part trips people up because the questions were quietly expanded last year. The age rating system for apps and games has been updated in order to provide people with more granular age ratings, and Apple has introduced new age rating questions to help identify sensitive content in apps.

The updated age rating system adds 13+, 16+, and 18+ to the existing 4+ and 9+ ratings.

In practical terms, the questionnaire now wants to know about:

·       In-app parental controls (do you have them?)

·       Whether the app contains a web browser or in-app chat

·       Medical and wellness content (a sleep tracker hits this; so does a meditation app with mental health content)

·       Violence themes, even cartoon ones

·       User-to-user contact features

Each of these maps to a regional descriptor. Australia weights some heavier than the US does. Vietnam, from July 18, will weight others differently again. The same set of answers can produce three different country-specific labels.

When our take is wrong

A few cases where this audit is genuinely lower priority than we're making it sound.

·       You don't have material downloads in Australia or Vietnam. Check App Store Connect Analytics. If those two markets together are under 1% of installs and you're not planning to market there, you can let the auto-update happen and check it after July 18.

·       You're a pure-utility B2B tool. A construction crew chat app or a warehouse inventory scanner is unlikely to swing on a 15+ to 16+ change. The label barely affects buying decisions in B2B.

·       You already maintain a compliance calendar. Some larger teams already have a quarterly rhythm where someone owns the App Store Connect questionnaire. If that's you, you're fine. This post is for the 80% who don't.

The artifact: a 7-question audit your team can run on Monday

Print this. Walk through it once per app you ship.

1.     What is our current age rating in Australia and Vietnam, today?

2.     When did we last open the age rating questionnaire in App Store Connect?

3.     Has our app added any of these since: chat, user content, browser, payments, randomized rewards, health content?

4.     Do any of those new features pull our Australia rating from 15+ into 16+?

5.     Does our EULA require a higher minimum age than the questionnaire is producing?

6.     Who on our team owns the questionnaire and will resubmit before July 18?

7.     Where will we file the dated screenshot of the new answers?

If you can't answer all seven without opening App Store Connect, you have your task list for this week.

If you want a second set of eyes

We've shipped over 100 apps and we've seen quiet regional changes like this tank conversion in markets a team wasn't watching. If you'd like us to audit your App Store Connect questionnaire and flag what's likely to shift on July 18, send us a note. One of our senior mobile engineers will walk through your apps, your current ratings, and the descriptor risks in Australia and Vietnam, and we'll send back a written summary in 48 hours. No charge for the audit if you have 3 or fewer apps.

The deadline is real. 1 month from now, your product page in two markets reads differently than it does today. Better to know what it'll say before your users do.

P.S. If you're shipping native iOS, the questionnaire is in App Store Connect under App Information → Age Rating. If you're using React Native or Flutter, the rating is set the same way; the framework doesn't matter. We've done this audit for Apptage native iOS clients and cross-platform clients alike. Same drill. Open the questionnaire. Re-answer it against the app you actually shipped. Save.

P.P.S. A working example of why this matters in practice: one of our older mobile builds, ResQ, had a chat feature added six months after launch. The questionnaire didn't get updated. The Australia rating drifted up a tier on a previous regional change and the team didn't catch it for two months. Don't be that team this time.