The Rating Creep

Back in 2008, 7.7% of that year's launches came with a 17+ rating. By 2019, that figure had risen to 10.2%. The climb wasn't steady, though. Mature apps peaked early at 9.9% in 2010, dropped to 8.4% by 2012, then worked back up through 9.7% in 2015 and 10% in 2018 before settling at 10.2% in 2019. Each of these numbers only describes the apps launched in that particular year, not some running total, so adding them together won't give you a meaningful cumulative share. The early-2010s dip probably traces back to the platform's gold rush phase, when a flood of casual and utility apps diluted the mature slice of the pie. The later rebound tracks with the App Store settling into a home for more serious gaming, dating, and adult-themed content. A three-point move over eleven years is worth noting, sure, but treat it as a gradual shift rather than proof that mature content is taking over the store.

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.

Out of the 1,044,105 apps covered here, 75% land in the 4+ tier, which works out to 782,605 apps once you count them up, and that figure alone should push back on any "mature creep" narrative people like to tell about app content. 17+ sits in second place with 148,061 apps (14.2%), followed by 12+ at 83,214 (8%) and 9+ at 29,610 (2.8%). Together those four ratings cover nearly the whole catalog. Then there's an odd little cluster hiding underneath: "+4", "+17", "+12", "+9", and "Not yet rated" each round down to 0% of the total, and even the biggest of that group, "+4", only has 390 apps to its name, while "+17" trails with just 152. My guess is these are leftover or malformed labels from some earlier version of the rating system, just sitting off to the side and never properly merged into the current tiers. Bottom line: the App Store's rating system really functions as a two-tier setup, mostly 4+, with a smaller but still real 17+ slice, and everything else is basically noise.

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.

Mature apps pull an average rating of 1.86, while everything else sits at 2.08. Do the math and mature apps come in at 89.6% of the non-mature number, about a tenth lower in relative terms. That's not a rounding fluke either. It shows up consistently across a set of 148,061 apps. There are a couple of reasonable explanations here: mature-rated content tends to cluster in categories, think gambling-adjacent apps, dating, mature games, where users sour quickly, or maybe people who bother rating 17+ apps already have stronger opinions going in since the content itself tends to provoke a reaction. Either way, a 1.86 average next to a 2.08 baseline for the rest of the store tells you the 17+ label is doing real work as a proxy for lower satisfaction. Worth knowing if you ever use average rating as a quality filter, because it's going to flag mature apps more than it should.

On average, mature apps pull in 3,396.9 reviews. Everything else lands at 2,778.3, meaning non-mature apps only manage 81.8% of the review volume their mature counterparts rack up. Here's the twist though: mature apps also carry the worse average rating, 1.86 against 2.08. So the tier with weaker ratings is somehow the one pulling more review activity per app. Lower satisfaction paired with higher engagement is an odd combination, but it makes more sense once you think about where mature apps actually live: dating apps, mature games, gambling-adjacent products. People open these things again and again, and they keep leaving reviews even when they're clearly not thrilled with what they're using. Treat review counts as a straightforward popularity signal and this tier will fool you. A mature app averaging 3,396.9 reviews looks like the bigger success story next to a non-mature app sitting at 2,778.3, but check the ratings underneath and the picture gets a lot less flattering. Volume and satisfaction pull apart here, so leaning on review count alone to judge quality would leave you with a badly wrong read on mature apps.