Apple Details New Parental Controls Coming to iOS 26 and macOS 26

Apple detailed today a couple of new tools coming to iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 later this year to help parents protect their kids and teens online. In addition to more granular age ratings on the App Store, Apple will allow parents to share their child’s age range with the apps they use to ensure that they get an age-appropriate experience.

Apple currently makes Child Accounts mandatory for all children under 13 using its devices, but these accounts are also available for teens up to 18. These Child Accounts must be associated with a parent or guardian account in a Family Sharing group, and child-appropriate settings like web content filters and app restrictions are applied by default.

Once parents are able to share their kids’ age range with apps later this year, they will be able to choose whether that information will always be shared, for each app request, or never. Children won’t be able to change these settings without their parents’ approval. Apple also won’t reveal kids’ birth dates to developers.

“With this update, families can have age-appropriate experiences within apps without the App Store collecting unnecessary sensitive personal data on every user, even those who simply want to download apps that provide weather updates or sports scores,” Apple explained today.

Teenagers between 13 to 17 using Apple devices will also get additional protections, whether they use a Child Account or a standard Apple account. The new age-appropriate protections, which will be enabled by default, include web content filters, Communication Safety (including a new feature to blur out nudity in FaceTime calls and Shared Albums in Photos), and more granular age ratings on the App Store.

“By the end of the year, age ratings will be expanded to five categories, with three ratings to support adolescents: 13+, 16+, and 18+. This will give users a more granular understanding of an app’s appropriateness, and developers a more precise way to rate their apps,” Apple said today.

Lastly, Apple will introduce new safety measures allowing parents to control who their kids using Apple devices can communicate with. Parents will be able to approve their kids’ requests to communicate with new phone numbers with a single tap in the Messages app. For third-party apps, a new PermissionKit framework will also allow app developers to implement a similar parental approval system when kids want to chat, follow, or add other users as friends.