One App Store Connect checkbox can force your app to 13+. As of this month you can't skip it.

From September 2026 you can't submit an update without saying whether your app has social media capabilities. Say yes and Apple applies a minimum 13+ rating and drops you into a Time Allowance parents can cap. The definition is broader than having a feed, and your secondary category is load-bearing too.

If you've shipped an update in the last few days you've already met this question. If you haven't, you will on your next one, and I'd rather you met it here than at 11pm with a release branch open.

Apple announced Time Allowances on 8 June and updated the age rating questionnaire on 9 July. The relevant line appears in both: starting September 2026, you're required to indicate whether your app or game includes social media capabilities in order to submit new versions or updates to the App Store, or for notarization for distribution on alternative marketplaces. It's September. It's live.

I read both pages this week rather than the coverage, partly because Murror is the kind of app where the answer isn't obvious, and partly because the second-order effects aren't in any of the summaries.

What the question actually asks.

Time Allowances let parents budget their kids' time by category - Entertainment, Games, Social Media - rather than app by app. Apple says the defaults are developed based on expert research and tailored to a child's age, as a starting point parents can then adjust. The important structural detail is stated plainly on the same page: Time Allowance categories are different from categories for user discovery on the App Store. Two separate taxonomies, and you're being sorted into both.

For Entertainment and Games, you're sorted by the category you picked in App Store Connect - primary or secondary. I'd reread that sentence if you chose a secondary category years ago for discovery reasons and never revisited it. It is now doing a job you didn't hire it for.

Social Media works differently. It's based on capability, regardless of the category you selected. Apple's definition is the ability to redistribute, amplify, or interact with user-generated content through a social feed or similar discovery method that visibly spreads content to many users.

Read that against your own app rather than against Instagram. "Interact with user-generated content through a similar discovery method" is doing a lot of work. A community tab. A public gallery of user-made templates. A leaderboard carrying user-written display names. A "what others are working on" panel someone added in a growth sprint two years ago. None of those is a social network, and every one of them is worth arguing about internally before you tick the box.

The two things that happen if you say yes.

First, a minimum age rating of 13+. Not a suggestion - Apple's wording is that the app will be placed in the Time Allowance category for Social Media and receive a minimum age rating of 13+. Whatever 4+ rating you built carefully around stops being available to you, regardless of what the rest of the questionnaire says.

Second, a new Social Media content descriptor appears on your App Store product page. That's a permanent label on your storefront, visible to every adult who lands there too.

The escape hatch, and what it costs.

There is a middle option. If you indicate that you have social media capabilities but they're disabled for anyone under 13, you're excluded from the Social Media Time Allowance category for under-13s, and your rating goes back to being determined by your overall questionnaire responses - possibly below 13+.

The price is in the same paragraph. You'll also need to use the Declared Age Range API, at a minimum, to check users' age ranges. So the cheap-sounding answer is actually an integration, a new permission moment in onboarding, and a code path that gates a feature by age. That's a sprint, not a checkbox. And you remain in the Social Media category for everyone 13 and above.

Why I think this is a distribution question, not a compliance one.

An age rating has always been a gate: can this person install it. A Time Allowance is a budget: how many minutes does this person have, shared with everything else in the bucket. Those are not the same kind of constraint, and the second one is worse for a small app. If you land in Social Media, you're drawing down the same allowance as the products that are extremely good at consuming it, and you will lose that competition. Being 13+ costs you a slice of the market. Being inside a shared, exhaustible budget costs you a slice of everyone who did install.

That's the part I haven't seen discussed anywhere, and I think it's the part that should decide the answer.

What I'd hold onto.

The honest answer for Murror was no - private journaling, nothing redistributed, no feed. That took about a minute. The useful twenty minutes went on the rest of the roadmap, because "would this feature put us in the Social Media bucket" is now a real input into whether a feature is worth building, and it wasn't three months ago.

Two caveats I'd want if I were reading this. I'm going off Apple's developer pages rather than from having seen the parent-side UI, so I can't tell you what the default allowances are in actual minutes. And "visibly spreads content to many users" has no threshold attached to it that I can find. If your feature is genuinely borderline, the person to ask is App Review, not me.