The Tech Transparency Project reported on Monday 19 October that test accounts registered to a 13-year-old could access 135 apps capable of producing nude imagery across Apple and Google’s stores in its investigation. Accounts with parental controls enabled could download dozens of them.
Key points
- The supervised Apple account could download 24 nudify apps, and the supervised Google account could download 51, the project found.
- Apple and Google base app age ratings on information developers provide in questionnaires, according to the project.
- Apps removed from the stores remained usable on the test phones, the project reported.
135 apps across four teen accounts
The project set up two Apple accounts and two Google accounts for a 13-year-old boy in the US, activating parental controls on one account from each company. It searched the stores using terms including “face swap” and “AI video generator”, then downloaded and tested apps returned in the results.
For its test, the project counted an app as nudify-capable if it could depict a woman fully or partially naked, or in a bikini or lingerie. Researchers used AI-generated pictures of fictional women rather than photographs of real people.
The supervised Apple account could download 24 of the apps and the supervised Google account 51, the project found. Data from mobile analytics firm AppMagic put the 135 apps’ combined downloads at 5.5 billion and global revenue at $3.9 billion, according to the project.
Apple and Google rely on developer ratings
Both companies use developers’ answers to online questionnaires to set app age ratings, the project reported. It found nudify-capable apps rated as suitable for minors, allowing the supervised accounts to obtain them despite controls set to require parental approval for downloads.
Apple and Google both prohibit nudify apps, according to the project. Apple said it removes developers who add such capabilities after an app has passed review, while Google spokesperson Dan Jackson said the company had suspended apps that violated its rules and restricted related store searches.
Three days after the project sought Apple’s comment, Apple added a prohibition on apps generating “nonconsensual intimate imagery” to its App Review Guidelines, the project reported. AI Affairs previously reported on Apple’s hidden-feature rule in those guidelines.
Removed apps remained on the test phones
Apple removed 25 of the apps and Google removed six during the investigation, the project reported. The researchers could still use apps they had already installed on the teen test phones.
Apple disputed the classification of some apps. Spokesperson Adam Dema said some were widely used editing tools without nudification or deepfake capabilities, the Guardian reported.
The risk to students is more immediate than an app-store rating. In December 2025, Morgan Dorfman learned that a student at her daughter’s Pennsylvania high school was using an app called Movely to make sexual videos from images of her daughter and five other girls, the Guardian reported.
Dorfman later found that Movely was no longer available to download from the App Store, but the copy on her phone still worked. She was also still being charged for her paid subscription.
