60% of AI Companion Apps Are Rated for Minors: What the New Store Data Shows

What the study found

Deepsee, an ad-quality firm, published an audit of AI character and companion apps — research credited to co-founder and CEO Rocky Moss and last updated on July 15, 2026. The sample was 4,346 listings: 1,464 on Google Play, representing roughly 610 million combined downloads, and 2,882 on Apple's App Store.

The headline number: 2,589 apps, or 60% of the set, carry a rating that classifies them as accessible to minors — Teen or lower on Google Play, 12+ or lower on the App Store. On Apple's platform alone, 1,469 of 2,882 listings (51%) are rated 12+ or lower, and 1,058 apps — over a third of the entire iOS sample — sit at 4+, the tier meant for the youngest users.

The stores don't agree with each other

The most useful finding for readers isn't the headline percentage — it's the inconsistency. Of the 306 apps that appear on both platforms, 106 are rated as accessible to minors on Google Play while carrying a 17+ rating on the App Store. Only four run the other way.

That asymmetry is hard to explain as honest disagreement about content. The same app, the same features, two ratings four tiers apart. Ratings are largely self-declared by developers against each store's questionnaire, and the incentive to declare downward — a wider addressable audience — points in one direction.

Ratings also move after launch

Deepsee recorded 252 rating changes on Apple's store during the observation period: 132 loosening against 120 tightening. Fifty-seven of the loosening apps fell the full four tiers, from 17+ down to 4+. A rating you checked when you installed an app is not necessarily the rating it carries now.

Why this is happening now

Store-side rules are tightening, which is part of why the gap is visible. Apple expanded App Store age ratings from two categories to five tiers, and in July 2026 added a set of social-media capability questions to its developer questionnaire that establishes a 13+ floor for apps carrying a feed, with responses becoming mandatory in September 2026.

The pressure isn't only from platforms. Legislators in the US have been moving on companion chatbots specifically — including a bipartisan federal bill proposing mandatory age verification for chatbot users, and state-level activity across dozens of legislatures. Several major apps have responded by adding age gates and restricting romantic modes for under-18 accounts. None of that changes the historical rating on a listing that nobody has revisited.

What to check instead of the store badge

An age rating is a declaration, not a control. These are checks you can run yourself in a few minutes, and they're the ones we weight in our own scoring:

• The signup age gate: does the app ask for a date of birth, and does it do anything if you enter an under-18 one? A gate that accepts any input is decoration.
• Filter defaults: is mature content off by default, and does turning it on require a separate confirmation? Default-on is the meaningful red flag, not the mere existence of the setting.
• Who can disable the filter: some apps gate it behind a paid tier, which is a payment check, not an age check.
• Retention and deletion: what the privacy policy actually commits to, and whether an in-app delete exists. See our privacy and safety checklist for how to verify each item.

How this affects our reviews

We already treat store age ratings as a weak, self-declared signal rather than a scoring input, and this data is a good argument for keeping it that way. Where we describe an app's age or content controls, we describe what we observed at signup and in settings, and label anything we could only source from the vendor's own materials as vendor-reported — consistent with our review methodology. Our privacy and age-verification guide covers the underlying mechanics in more depth.

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