The Maturity Drift

From 2011 through 2017 the 17+ share basically sits still: 9.0%, 8.4%, 8.7%, 8.9%, 9.7%, 9.6%, 9.5%. That's a one point band held for the better part of a decade, which is what you'd expect once a review process settles into routine. Then things start moving: 2018 reaches 10%, 2019 hits 10.2%, 2020 rises to 10.6%, 2021 to 11.6%, 2022 to 13.6%, and 2023 jumps to 21.4%. Each year's increase is bigger than the last one, so this reads as an accelerating trend, not a one off correction. The 2023 number is more than double the 2012 low of 8.4%. Maybe categories added mature content disclosures, maybe user generated content apps started defaulting to stricter ratings, or maybe Apple just tightened its review guidance. Whatever's behind it, the effect kept compounding instead of flattening out. Anyone tracking catalog composition should treat 2023 as a structural break, not noise you can average away.

The 4+ share peaked at 80.6% back in 2014, then it was downhill from there: 78.5% in both 2015 and 2016, 78.3% in 2017, more or less flat through 2019, then 77.5% in 2020, 76.9% in 2021, 75.1% in 2022, and finally 68.2% in 2023. That drop from 75.1% to 68.2% in just one year is the sharpest single-year move you'll find anywhere in this dataset, up or down. It lines up almost exactly with the steepest rise in the 17+ line, and that kind of overlap isn't a coincidence; the two are moving together, not independently. The math between these two tiers never fully closes, of course, since 12+ and 9+ ratings are sitting in there too, soaking up part of the difference. Still, the direction is obvious once you look at it: the slice of apps anyone can open is shrinking, and the latest year on record shows it shrinking faster than ever. The App Store built its reputation on being safe territory for kids, and losing almost 12 points of all-ages share since 2014 is a pretty clear sign that reputation no longer fits.

Pull up every app that launched before 2015 and the breakdown settles at 79% rated 4+, 9.1% rated 12+, 8.8% rated 17+, and 3.1% rated 9+. Pretty much everything else in this study gets weighed against that 79% baseline. The 17+ share, 8.8%, lines up well with where the yearly series put it for most of the early 2010s, so two different slices of the data agree with each other. The older notation, +4, +12, and +17, almost never shows up in this cohort, which tells you the rating scheme itself used to be a lot more consistent. This group basically functions as the control for the whole study: mature content stays a minor concern, under one in eleven apps, and roughly four out of five carry a rating meant for everyone.

Look at apps released in 2015 or later and the split comes out to 74.6% rated 4+, 14.6% rated 17+, 7.9% rated 12+, and 2.8% rated 9+. Stack that against the pre-2015 numbers and the 17+ share jumps from 8.8% to 14.6%, while 4+ slides from 79% down to 74.6%. The 12+ and 9+ tiers shrink too, just not by as much (9.1% down to 7.9%, and 3.1% down to 2.8%). What that tells us is that the 17+ growth isn't coming from one place, it's pulling share away from every tier around it. The old legacy labels (+4, +17, +12, +9) still sit at or near zero in this group, which just confirms the rating system itself hasn't changed, only the apps filling it have. With 17+ at 14.6%, that's roughly one in seven apps released since 2015 carrying a mature rating, versus roughly one in eleven before that point. So if anyone wants to know whether the App Store has skewed more mature over time, this is the number to point to. Cohort by cohort, yes, it has.

Since 2018, 45.7% of Medical apps have carried a 17+ rating, with Social Networking not far behind at 40.0%. Every other category in the top ten lands somewhere between 17.4% (Lifestyle) and 22.2% (News), a full 18 points below Social Networking and nearly 24 points below Medical. That gap is really the whole story. There's no gentle slope here. What you've got is two outliers sitting well above a tight cluster of everyone else. Medical's number starts to make sense once you think about how often health apps deal with clinical content, prescription details, or body-related material that trips conservative rating defaults. Social Networking's 40% takes a bit more digging: user-generated content, messaging, and the sheer impossibility of pre-screening everything someone might post all push platforms toward defensive 17+ labeling. News at 22.2%, Shopping at 21.6%, and Entertainment at 20.9% form a second tier, where mature content pops up fairly often but never really takes over. The maturity drift stays concentrated in those two categories. It just doesn't spread evenly across the rest.

Apps that came out before 2015 land at a 17+ rate of 8.83%. Push the window to 2015 onward and that number climbs to 14.62%, which puts the older figure at just 60.4% of the newer one. Rounding doesn't explain a gap that size. The recent batch simply carries more mature content, and that's not chance at work. Looking at the two eras side by side also cancels out a lot of the noise hiding in the year-by-year numbers, leaving one real question: did the catalog's structure actually shift between the before and after groups? It did, and the margin is wide enough that no single weird year could be dragging the average around. Throw in the jump to 21.4% in 2023 and the pattern comes into focus, a slow build that started well before 2015 and then kicked into a much faster gear in the latest data. Anyone forecasting off this catalog should treat 14.62% as the going baseline. That old 8.83% figure belongs to a store that doesn't exist anymore.

These findings first appeared in The Rating Creep (published 24 Oct 2026), which we have retired: its launch-year series ended at 2019, and its conclusion that the 17+ share rose only modestly is superseded by the analysis above. The 2 findings below do not depend on that conclusion, so we kept them. Their figures were computed on 24 Oct 2026 and are not recomputed. See the corrections log.

You'd think warning labels on apps would climb right alongside the rise in mature content. They didn't. The average number of advisories per app rose to 0.6 in 2009 from 0.3 in 2008, slipped back to 0.5 for 2010 and 2011, then sat at 0.4 for every launch year from 2012 through 2019. Eight years, and the number never budged. Meanwhile the 17+ share grew from 8.4% in 2012 to 10.2% in 2019, while the density of explicit warnings per app stayed frozen the whole time. Apple's advisory categories probably locked into place early on, so apps keep landing in the same handful of buckets no matter how mature the catalog gets around them. It's also possible developers of newer mature apps lean on the 17+ rating to do the heavy lifting, listing fewer individual advisories since the rating itself already says enough. Whatever's driving it, you can't judge how risky an app is just by counting its advisories. That count hasn't moved in eight years, even though the thing it's supposed to measure clearly has.

Only 152 apps in the App Store carry the '+17' tag, a tiny sliver of the catalog, yet they average 4.0 in price, the highest of any tier we looked at. The standard 17+ tier is a different animal entirely: 148,061 apps, averaging just 1.0. That's actually cheaper than 4+ at 0.9 (17+ only just clears it), and it falls well short of 9+ at 1.6 and 12+ at 1.3. Mature content simply doesn't command a premium in today's market. Developers park 17+ apps near the bottom of the price scale instead of charging more for restricted content. Then there's '+9', averaging 0, and '+12', averaging 0.3, small legacy buckets that act nothing like their modern counterparts (9+ at 1.6, 12+ at 1.3). The gap between '+17' at 4.0 and 17+ at 1.0 probably has more to do with app age or an older monetization era than any real pricing logic around mature content today. If you're building a pricing strategy around content rating, here's the lesson: a 17+ label doesn't buy you room to charge more. If anything, it lines up with charging less.