The age rating systems are a major issue in some countries for applications stores. No global or united age rating system is established yet among the major application stores, despite attempts by the CTIA Wireless. Therefore, we wondered whether similar apps have different age ratings across the two largest application stores: Apple App Store for iPhone and Google Android Market. The answer is yes, they do!
We studied the Apple App Store for iPhone’s top 200 overall free and paid of last Friday in the United States and matched those apps with similar applications in Android Market. This resulted in a sample of 117 apps that were available in both the Apple App Store and Google Android Market. One could expect that this sample would have a similar distribution of age rating in both stores. However, this is not the case. The pie charts clearly show that the lowest age rating tier (4+) is used more often in Apple App Store for iPhone than in Google Android Market. This 4+ rating tier is the largest tier for the apps in the Apple App Store with 73% of applications belonging to this tier, while only 42% of the same applications have the lowest rating tier in Android Market. Moreover, 37% of the apps in this sample had a “Low Maturity” rating in Android Market, while only 9% of these apps have an age rating of 9+ (second tier) in the Apple App Store.
In general, developers are responsible for rating their apps, which must be done in line with the stores’ guidelines. However, these guidelines vary across stores, which explains the differences in the age rating distribution above. For example, Android’s guidelines state that apps with user to user communication or apps that publish users’ location must be rated as “Medium maturity”. Apple does not have such requirements for functionalities but only for the content of the app itself. The age rating of social apps like Twitter and Facebook illustrate this point clearly. These apps have a medium maturity (3rd rating tier) in the Android Market, but only the lowest age rating (4+) in the Apple App Store. However, the variety in rating guidelines does not explain the enormous age rate gap between Apple App Store and Android Market for ‘QR Reader’ by Tapmedia. This app is qualified as low maturity in Android Market, while this app has the highest age rating category, 17+, in the Apple App Store.
Tiuri van Agten