Nudify apps stayed open to a 13-year-old, report finds

The Tech Transparency Project said on October 19, 2026 that Apple's App Store and Google Play let a 13-year-old test account download dozens of "nudify" apps that strip the clothes off people in photos or put them into sexually explicit AI-generated video, and that parental controls did not stop it. Across the investigation, TTP said the four test accounts reached a total of 135 nudify apps, which it says have been downloaded 5.5 billion times and earned $3.9 billion in global revenue, per data from the mobile analytics firm AppMagic.

The methodology matters for what the numbers mean. TTP created four accounts presenting as a 13-year-old boy in the US, two on Apple and two on Google. One account in each pair had parental controls switched on, restricting downloads to apps rated for 13 and requiring a parent to approve every download. Both stores let the accounts reach the apps anyway. The default Apple account reached 61 nudify apps and the supervised Apple account 24; the default Google account reached 47 and the supervised Google account 51. Both stores also served the teen accounts ads for nudify apps, TTP said.

TTP says the root of the problem is how both companies rate apps. Apple and Google set age ratings from developers' own answers in online questionnaires, a self-reporting system that TTP found labels adult-oriented apps as suitable for minors. On the default Apple account, a pop-up warned that an app contained "age-restricted material" and asked the user to confirm they were 17 or older, then let the 13-year-old tap OK and continue. TTP said Google blocked the default account three times, only where the app's own developer had chosen to age-restrict it.

Apple pushed back on part of the finding. The company told TTP it does not consider an app that takes a photo of a clothed woman and strips her to a bikini or lingerie to be nudification, defining nudify apps as those that show someone naked or in a sex act. Apple named CapCut and Picsart as examples it does not treat as nudify-capable, calling them "mainstream photo and video editing tools with legitimate, widely used core functionality." TTP said it asked Apple how it applies its own ban on nonconsensual intimate imagery to apps that put women in minimal clothing, and has not heard back.

There has been movement since. Three days after TTP reached out to Apple for comment, Apple added language to its App Store review guidelines prohibiting apps that generate "nonconsensual intimate imagery" and tightened rules against apps with "hidden, dormant, or undocumented features." A Google spokesman, Dan Jackson, said Google "does not allow apps that contain sexual content or allow users to nudify images of people," and that it had suspended violating apps and restricted related search terms.

The report lands as schools across the US keep dealing with students targeting classmates with sexual deepfakes. TTP also noted a limit on any takedown fix: once a nudify app is downloaded, it kept working on the test phones even after Apple and Google removed it from their stores.

The full report and its methodology are published by the Tech Transparency Project at techtransparencyproject.org.