Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) doesn’t operate a major social-media platform, but Australia’s latest push to regulate how people use social media has unexpectedly put the iPhone maker into the conversation.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met Apple Executive Chair Tim Cook at Apple Park this month and later said Cook regarded Australia’s work on social media as “world-leading.” Apple did not independently use that description when Reuters sought comment. Instead, the company referred Reuters to a post from Cook saying he had shared some of Apple’s newest innovations with Albanese, including controls designed to help keep children safe online.
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Cook’s comments don’t amount to an endorsement of every detail of Australia’s regulatory approach. What the meeting does highlight is the overlap between an issue receiving increasing government attention and a part of Apple’s own software that the company has recently expanded considerably. Australia became the first country to ban social media for children under 16 in December. Other governments have since considered restrictions of their own, with Reuters reporting that the European Commission has proposed a ban for children under 13.
Australia is already considering going further. Earlier this month, the government proposed draft legislation that would require social-media platforms to give users a choice over their default feeds. Users could opt into algorithmically recommended content or choose instead to see posts from friends and creators they follow, and the government plans to seek feedback before introducing the bill to Parliament later this year.
Apple Has Been Expanding Its Own Child-Safety Tools
Just days before Cook met Albanese, Apple made a new collection of child-safety features available with iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27. Among the additions is Time Allowances, which lets parents manage how much time children spend across app categories including Social Media, Entertainment, and Games. Parents receive age-tailored guidance as a starting point and can adjust the limits themselves.
Apple also redesigned Screen Time to give parents a clearer view of their children’s device usage and most-used apps. Another feature, Ask to Browse, allows parents to require approval before a child accesses a new website in Safari. Communication Safety has been expanded as well, and Apple says the feature now blocks gore and violent content, in addition to nudity, when such material is detected in shared images and videos.
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These features were not introduced in response to Albanese’s visit or Australia’s latest proposal, as Apple first previewed them in June, months before the September meeting. The company says the updates were informed by guidance from online-safety and health experts. Apple’s child-safety strategy and Australia’s regulatory push are separate developments that increasingly touch on some of the same issues.
Social Media Is Getting Special Treatment Inside Apple’s Ecosystem
There is another Apple change that is particularly relevant to the Australian story. Starting this month, developers must indicate whether their apps or games contain social-media capabilities when submitting new versions or updates to the App Store. Apple defines those capabilities as including the redistribution, amplification, or interaction with user-generated content through a social feed or similar discovery method.
When developers indicate that an app contains those features, Apple places it in the Social Media category for Time Allowances and gives it a minimum age rating of 13+. A new Social Media content descriptor also appears in the age-ratings section of its App Store product page. There is an exception for developers that disable social-media capabilities for users under 13. In that case, Apple requires developers, at a minimum, to use its Declared Age Range API to check a user’s age range before enabling those features.
That API is another part of Apple’s approach to age-appropriate experiences, and the company says that developers can use it to request a child’s age range and tailor their app accordingly without receiving the child’s birthday. None of these changes amounts to Apple enforcing Australia’s under-16 social-media ban. However, Apple’s tools largely give parents ways to manage what children can access and how much time they spend in different categories of apps, while its developer tools help apps provide age-appropriate experiences.
Conclusion
Apple has spent years building parental controls into its devices, but its latest software updates put considerably more emphasis on how children access apps, websites, and social media. The company has also added new requirements for developers whose apps contain social-media capabilities.
Those changes are arriving as Australia pushes ahead with some of the world’s most prominent restrictions on children’s social-media use and other governments consider measures of their own. Cook’s meeting with Albanese doesn’t turn online safety into a new Apple growth engine, and the available evidence doesn’t justify treating it as one. What it does show is that an area where Apple has recently expanded its products and developer requirements is becoming a much larger subject of government attention.
For Apple investors, that makes child safety worth following, not because it is producing measurable financial returns today, but because Apple’s latest software changes are increasingly intersecting with an important regulatory debate.
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This article is originally published at Insider Monkey.
