Meta and Snap push app-store age checks

A proposal backed by Meta and Snap would shift age verification for social media from individual apps to Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store, effectively turning two private gatekeepers into the default identity checkpoint for children’s internet access.

Euronews Next reports that the pitch is framed as a parental-control upgrade: parents would approve or reject downloads, and the app store would provide “consistent age signals” to apps. In practice, the model tightens control at the point of installation while leaving everything after the download largely untouched. Serge Egelman, a research director at UC Berkeley, told Euronews that once a parent approves a download, “a lot of the parental controls end,” and parents have limited visibility into what happens inside the app.

The proposal arrives as European governments debate broader restrictions on children’s social media use. App-store age checks offer regulators something administratively neat: a small number of entities to supervise, a single chokepoint to mandate compliance, and a technical story that can be sold as “doing something” without rewriting every platform’s product design. But the same concentration creates a new dependency. If age assurance becomes an app-store requirement, the pressure shifts to whatever proof-of-age method the stores adopt—ID documents, face scans, or third-party verification services—turning “age checks” into a demand pipeline for identity infrastructure.

The workarounds are already obvious. Euronews cites factory resets as the simplest bypass: reset the phone, set it up without parental controls, and reinstall. More technical users can install alternative operating systems or use alternative app stores such as F-Droid, which hosts open-source apps outside Apple and Google’s ecosystems. And even a perfectly enforced app-store gate does nothing for access via web browsers on laptops and desktop computers.

Supporters argue that consistent age signals would help platforms enforce their own rules. Critics counter that the mechanism encourages a compliance theatre: the system can generate “verified” age metadata while leaving addictive design, recommendation systems, and social pressures unchanged. It also shifts responsibility from parents and platforms to a small set of infrastructure firms that already control distribution, payments, and visibility for most mobile software.

If the policy moves forward, the practical question is not whether children can be kept off social media—Euronews’ own reporting suggests they cannot—but which entities will be authorised to decide what counts as a valid identity signal, and how broadly that signal will be reused.

For now, Apple and Google already offer parental tools. The new proposal would make those tools a regulatory boundary, and a commercial service layer.