Google Play will start telling apps your age. It claims it's without your date of birth

Lawmakers worldwide are pushing for apps to know whether an adult or a twelve-year-old child is using them. Most ways to achieve this involve uploading an ID or scanning a face – data much more sensitive than age itself. Google announced on July 29 that it wants to solve this differently.

Apps will receive a category, not a date

The Play Age Signals interface works simply: an app queries Google Play and, instead of a date of birth, receives an age band. By default, there are four – 0–12, 13–15, 16–17, and 18+. Developers can set up to three custom boundary values in the Play console, which must be at least two years apart and can be changed once a year.

This way, apps will know you’re a teenager, but not your birthday. No ID, no selfies, no biometrics. An interesting detail: the interface can distinguish the origin of the data – whether a parent set it, the user entered it themselves, or if it resulted from an estimate or verification. So, the app also knows how seriously to take the information.

At the same time, Google restricts how the data may be used. Exclusively for adapting content and communication to age – not for advertising, profiling, or analytics.

Parents set it once, not in every app

The most practical part of the entire system. You set your child’s age band in Google Family Link, and all participating apps draw it from there. This eliminates the need to navigate twenty settings in twenty apps, a situation where most parents currently give up.

Furthermore, sharing is not automatically enabled. A parent must allow it and can change or disable it at any time. For adults without parental supervision, in regions with relevant regulations, a prompt may appear asking if you want to share your age band. Declining means the developer receives nothing – just be aware that, according to Google, the prompt may appear several more times before it stops.

When and where it will work

The interface is already returning live data in Brazil, where it has been running since March. By mid-August, it is expected to expand to Australia and Canada, and globally by the end of 2026. The interface works on phones, foldables, and tablets with Android 6.0 and newer, and Google states that after a birthday, it takes two to eight weeks for the stored data to update automatically.

However, one ambiguity remains. Developer documentation states that the interface returns data only for users in regions where Play is legally required to do so. The July announcement, on the other hand, talks about global deployment, including countries without such an obligation. Which interpretation ultimately applies to the Czech Republic cannot be determined from the available materials, and Google has not specified a concrete timeline for individual European markets.

For the record, let’s add that the interface is still in beta, and its actual impact depends on how many developers integrate it. Apple, by the way, launched its own equivalent, Declared Age Range, this February, so both major platforms are heading in the same direction – moving age verification to the store and account level and leaving the actual handling to the apps.

Is sharing an age category a reasonable compromise, or just another piece of data apps know about you?

Sources: Android Developers, TechRepublic, XenoSpectrum, Softonic