Apple App Store Kids Category · App Review Guidelines + “Design safe and age-appropriate experiences”, retrieved 2026-08-13

Apple publishes no single Kids requirements document, so Keel builds one: the App Store rules whose duty is triggered by a child, a minor, an underage user, or by the Kids Category, taken from the App Store Review Guidelines and Apple’s age-appropriate design page. That covers the App Store Connect age band, parental gates and the adult-level task a gate has to be, the rule against sending personally identifiable or device information to third parties — which reaches sections of the app intended for adults — human review of any advertising displayed, and third-party analytics and advertising excluded by default with narrow carve-outs. Requirements persist even after the Kids Category is deselected. This is not a model of the Review Guidelines as a whole, and it does not predict an App Review outcome: every numbered guideline still binds the app.

20

requirements tracked

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Add-on from $39/mo

Children’s Privacy: COPPA, Google Play Families, Amazon Appstore Child-Directed Apps, Apple App Store Kids Category are one add-on at $39/mo, bought through COPPA, and together they count as one framework against your plan’s allowance.

Important

Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines are program terms Apple can revise without notice, and there is no version number to pin - the Guidelines page recorded “Last Updated: June 8, 2026” when Keel retrieved it, and the page it links to for the Kids Category rules, “Design safe and age-appropriate experiences” (developer.apple.com/app-store/parental-gates/ - that is the URL’s name, not the page’s), publishes no date at all, so its retrieval date is the only freshness signal it has; both were retrieved on 2026-08-13. This framework covers only the rules whose duties are triggered by a child, a minor, an underage user or the Kids Category; all 125 numbered guidelines still apply to your app, and scoring here says nothing about whether an app will pass App Review. Check the live Guidelines before relying on this for a submission.

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Scope

How much of the standard Keel models

Models its declared scope in full

Keel authors every leaf requirement in the scope declared below — all 20 of them, with nothing inside that scope left out. A test fails the build if the authored count and the declared count ever diverge, so this framework cannot quietly lose requirements after the fact.

Authored in Keel: 20 requirements
In Keel’s scored scope: 20 leaf requirements

Checked against

Two Apple pages, both retrieved 2026-08-13: (S1) App Store Review Guidelines, https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ - the page recorded "Last Updated: June 8, 2026". 125 numbered guidelines. (S2) "Design safe and age-appropriate experiences for your apps and games", https://developer.apple.com/app-store/parental-gates/ - the page Guideline 1.3 defers to ("Learn more about parental gates"). NOTE THE NAME: /parental-gates/ is the URL's name and no longer the page's. That URL resolves and is the canonical location of the obligation, but what it serves is Apple's broader age-appropriate design page, and the parental-gate duties sit inside it under the heading "Kids category" - a reader following this citation should expect that page, not one titled "parental gates". No publication or update date anywhere on it, so the retrieval date is its only freshness signal.

Keel publishes this for every framework it ships, complete or not, so a readiness percentage can be read against a denominator you can see. Compare every framework

Who it is for

Who needs Apple App Store Kids Category?

Studios shipping into the App Store Kids Category, or considering leaving it
Apps intended primarily for kids that sit outside the category and still carry its analytics and advertising limits
Any app that collects, transmits, or is merely capable of sharing a minor’s information

What Keel does

How Keel helps with Apple App Store Kids Category

The child-triggered guidelines as a scored control set, with every excluded guideline enumerated so the boundary is inspectable
A retrieval date instead of an invented version number — Apple publishes neither a version nor a change log for these pages
A monthly re-check of the published source pages, reported for a human to read rather than applied automatically

Collect once, comply everywhere

Apple App Store Kids Category shares canonical controls with Google Play Families, COPPA and Amazon Appstore Child-Directed Apps and others in the catalog. Implement one of those controls and it counts toward every framework it satisfies, so adding Apple App Store Kids Category rarely means starting from scratch.

Shares canonical controls with

ISO/IEC 27001 no shared canonical controls
CIS Critical Security Controls no shared canonical controls
PCI DSS no shared canonical controls
SOC 2 no shared canonical controls
SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) Section 404 no shared canonical controls
NIST Cybersecurity Framework no shared canonical controls
NIST SP 800-53 no shared canonical controls
NIST SP 800-171 no shared canonical controls
HIPAA no shared canonical controls
GDPR shares canonical controls
COPPA shares canonical controls
Google Play Families shares canonical controls
Amazon Appstore Child-Directed Apps shares canonical controls
PIPEDA no shared canonical controls
ISO 9001 no shared canonical controls
AI Governance Essentials no shared canonical controls
ISO/IEC 42001 no shared canonical controls
NIST AI Risk Management Framework no shared canonical controls
EU AI Act no shared canonical controls
ESG Essentials no shared canonical controls
US Employment Law - Federal Baseline no shared canonical controls

A framework is lit when at least one canonical control satisfies both Apple App Store Kids Category and that framework. Unlit means none of them do — an absence, not a judgment about that standard. 4 of 21 are lit here.

Other frameworks: ISO/IEC 27001 · CIS Critical Security Controls · PCI DSS · SOC 2 · SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley) Section 404 · NIST Cybersecurity Framework · All frameworks