Children's apps: advertising, tracking and privacy statistics

How many young children are actually using apps?

Most of them, and earlier than people tend to assume: about two-thirds of children aged 8 and under have used a smartphone or tablet, and four in ten have their own tablet by their second birthday.

• 68% of children aged 0 to 8 have used a smartphone or tablet to play games, watch videos, go online or use apps.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

  Nationally representative survey of 1,578 US parents of children aged 8 or under, fielded 5–29 August 2024. Margin of error ±2.9%. The report is titled 2025 but the fieldwork is 2024.

• 47% of children aged 0 to 8 have their own tablet. By age 2, 40% do; by age 4, 58% do.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

  Tablets have the highest ownership of any mobile device among this age group.

• Children aged 8 and under spend about two and a half hours a day with screen media — one hour for under-2s, two hours eight minutes at ages 2 to 4, and three and a half hours at ages 5 to 8.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

  The average hides a wide spread: on a given day 27% of children use no screens at all, while one in five uses four hours or more.

• Total screen time among children aged 8 and under has barely moved since 2020 — 2 hours 27 minutes, against 2 hours 24 minutes four years earlier.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

  What changed is composition, not total: time watching video fell 17 minutes while time gaming rose 15 minutes.

• 65% of UK children aged 3 to 7 make drawings or pictures on a device, or use colouring apps.

  Ofcom, Children and Parents: Media Use and Attitudes · Published 21 May 2026

  Measures digital creation specifically, not drawing on paper. For children aged 7 and under the answers come from a parent, not the child. Ofcom changed its age bands in 2025, so this figure cannot be compared with older 3–4 or 5–7 bands.

How much advertising is in apps made for young children?

Almost all of it, in almost all of them. In the largest content analysis of its kind, 95% of the most-downloaded apps for children aged 5 and under contained advertising — and every free app did.

• 95% of apps reviewed for children aged 5 and under contained at least one type of advertising — 129 of 135 apps.

  Meyer et al., "Advertising in Young Children's Apps: A Content Analysis," Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics · Published January 2019 (online October 2018)

  Figures read in the published abstract rather than the full text. The 135 apps are 96 most-downloaded apps in Google Play's 5 And Under category plus 39 pilot apps.

• Advertising appeared in 100% of the free children's apps studied, against 88% of paid apps — and at similar rates in apps labelled "educational" as in those that were not.

  Meyer et al., Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics · Published January 2019

  The "educational" finding is the load-bearing one: the label offered no protection.

• The commonest forms were full-app teasers (46%), commercial characters (42%), pop-up video advertising interrupting play (35%), and in-app purchases (30%).

  Meyer et al., Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics · Published January 2019

  Also recorded: prompts to rate the app (28%), banner advertising across the screen (17%), video ads required to unlock play items (16%), prompts to share on social media (14%), and hidden advertising disguised with misleading symbols or camouflaged as gameplay (7%).

• 58% of top children's "educational" apps scored as lower-quality when assessed against learning-science criteria; only 6% scored highly.

  Meyer et al., "How educational are 'educational' apps for young children?", Journal of Children and Media · 2021

  124 apps: the 100 highest-download children's educational apps on Google Play and Apple, plus 24 apps most played by preschoolers in a cohort study. Free apps scored worse than paid (64% vs 50% lower-quality), which the authors attribute to "the presence of distracting enhancements."

Are apps made for children tracking them?

A majority are. Two-thirds of the apps preschoolers actually played sent persistent identifiers to third parties, and separate audits found the same pattern on both Android and iOS.

• 67% of apps played by preschool-aged children transmitted persistent identifiers to third parties — 303 of 451 apps, reaching between 1 and 33 third-party domains each.

  Zhao et al., "Data Collection Practices of Mobile Applications Played by Preschool-Aged Children," JAMA Pediatrics · Published 8 September 2020; data 2018–2020

  Figures read in the published abstract. Unlike other studies these were not chart-toppers but the apps 124 real children (mean age 3.85) actually opened, measured on their own devices.

• 57% of 5,855 child-directed Android apps were found to be potentially violating COPPA, the US children's privacy law.

  Reyes et al., "Won't Somebody Think of the Children? Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale," Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2018

  Breakdown: 40.0% shared personal information without reasonable security measures, 39.0% showed disregard for contractual obligations protecting children's privacy, 18.8% shared persistent identifiers with third parties for prohibited purposes, and 4.8% shared location or contact information without consent. Android only, 2018.

• 19% of children's apps collected identifiers or other personal information using SDKs whose own terms of service prohibit their use in child-directed apps.

  Reyes et al., Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2018

• Of apps sharing a resettable advertising ID with advertisers, 66% also transmitted non-resettable persistent identifiers — defeating the privacy protection the resettable ID exists to provide.

  Reyes et al., Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies · 2018

• All 25 children's iOS apps in one traffic audit shared user data outside the app, reaching 165 unique hosts between them.

  Pimienta et al., "Mobile apps and children's privacy: a traffic analysis of data sharing practices among children's mobile iOS apps," Archives of Disease in Childhood · Published 27 August 2023; apps sampled July 2022

  Small and deliberately non-random: 25 apps purposively sampled from 6,264 identified. Its value is that it covers iOS, where the other large audits are Android. 44% transmitted at least one piece of data considered personal information to third parties, and 72% transmitted data to analysis-related third parties despite Apple's guidelines.

What have regulators actually done about it?

The largest penalties in US Federal Trade Commission history have involved children's data, including a $275 million COPPA penalty against Epic Games and a $170 million settlement with Google and YouTube.

• Google and YouTube paid $170 million — $136 million to the FTC and $34 million to New York — over allegations that YouTube collected persistent identifiers from viewers of child-directed channels without parental consent.

  US Federal Trade Commission · 4 September 2019

• Epic Games paid a $275 million penalty for violating the COPPA Rule — the largest penalty ever obtained for violating an FTC rule — plus $245 million in refunds over dark patterns and billing practices.

  US Federal Trade Commission · 19 December 2022

• Disney paid $10 million over allegations that mislabelling child-directed videos allowed personal data to be collected from children under 13 and used for targeted advertising.

  US Federal Trade Commission · 2 September 2025

What do parents actually think about this?

Roughly three-quarters of parents of young children are worried about both data collection and advertising — and a majority are positive about creative uses of media.

• 73% of parents of children aged 8 and under are worried about data collection by companies, and 72% about advertising and materialism in screen media.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

• 63% of parents say they enjoy seeing their child use media creatively.

  Common Sense Media, Common Sense Census · 2024 data, published 2025

What does official guidance actually say about screen time?

It changed in February 2026, and most pages quoting it are now out of date. The American Academy of Pediatrics has stepped back from single-number limits, the WHO's per-age caps remain but are graded on very low quality evidence, and the UK's Royal College has withdrawn its guidance entirely.

• The WHO recommends no screen time for infants under 1, none at age 1, no more than one hour at age 2, and no more than one hour for ages 3 to 4 — "less is better" at every stage.

  World Health Organization, Guidelines on physical activity, sedentary behaviour and sleep for children under 5 · 2019

  The limits are banded by age. Collapsing them into "one hour for under-5s" reverses WHO's advice for the youngest children, for whom the recommendation is none at all.

• The WHO grades the evidence behind its own screen time limits as very low quality, while still issuing them as strong recommendations.

  World Health Organization · 2019

  WHO's own wording: "Strong recommendations, very low quality evidence." Rarely quoted, and the single most useful line for anyone weighing how firm this guidance really is.

• In February 2026 the American Academy of Pediatrics stated that children and media "cannot be viewed solely through the lens of individual child behaviors or screen limits alone."

  American Academy of Pediatrics, "Digital Ecosystems, Children, and Adolescents: Policy Statement," Pediatrics · 1 February 2026

  DOI 10.1542/peds.2025-075320. The publisher's own site blocks automated access; this link is the publisher-deposited copy on PubMed Central.

• The AAP has not abolished time limits — it now offers them when a caregiver asks, suggesting under an hour a day for toddlers and preschoolers and one to two hours of entertainment media for school-aged children.

  American Academy of Pediatrics, Pediatrics · 1 February 2026

  Both "the AAP dropped screen limits" and "the AAP says two hours" are wrong. Limits were demoted to one option among several, behind content quality and displaced activities such as sleep, play and reading.

• The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends no screen time under age 2 apart from video chat, and about one hour or less for ages 2 to 5.

  Canadian Paediatric Society, Digital Health Task Force · Posted 24 November 2022

  The "no screens under 2" rule belongs to Canada. The AAP's threshold is 18 months, with a video-chat exception. The two are routinely conflated.

• The UK's Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has archived its screen time guidance and does not currently endorse any screen time resource.

  Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health · Page updated 29 May 2026; guidance originally 2019

  Any page still citing the RCPCH 2019 guide as current UK guidance is out of date.

Claims that don’t hold up

These are repeated widely, including by sources that ought to be reliable. We checked them and could not stand them up, so they are here rather than in the numbers above.

• "Children are increasingly unable to hold a pencil."

  No study supports this.

  The claim traces to a single practitioner quote given to a newspaper in 2018 — no sample, no data, no paper. Downstream outlets upgraded it into "a new study conducted by the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust," which does not exist. The same original article quotes a researcher warning that without research there is a risk of assuming too much. If you want a real, current number for early fine motor skill, England's Early Years Foundation Stage Profile assessed 589,471 children and found 14.5% below the expected level for fine motor skills in 2024/25.

  • DfE, Early Years Foundation Stage Profile results, 2024/25

• "Children's playtime has decreased by 25%" / "children have lost 12 hours a week of free time."

  Does not reconcile with the source it cites.

  The figures appear in an AAP clinical report, which cites Hofferth and Sandberg's time-diary work. Hofferth's own peer-reviewed paper reports children aged 6 to 12 going from about 57 discretionary hours a week in 1981 to about 50 in 1997 — which she describes as "the 12% decline from 1981 to 1997." That is roughly seven hours and 12%, not twelve hours and 25%. The underlying decline is real; the numbers in circulation are not the ones in the source.

  • Hofferth, "Changes in American children's time – 1997 to 2003," electronic International Journal of Time Use Research

• "The AAP recommends no more than two hours of screen time a day."

  Unsupported.

  No current AAP page states this. The AAP's own consumer guidance caps entertainment media at one hour a day from 18 months to age five, and its February 2026 policy offers one to two hours only as a discussable range for school-aged children and teenagers. The two-hour rule is a pre-2016 guideline that survives in secondary write-ups.

• "The WHO says under-5s should have no more than an hour of screen time."

  Wrong as written.

  The WHO's recommendation is banded: none under 1, none at 1, one hour at 2, one hour at ages 3 to 4. Collapsing it to "under 5" reverses the advice for the youngest children, for whom the recommendation is no screen time at all.

• "The AAP recommends no screens before age 2."

  Wrong attribution.

  The AAP's threshold is 18 months, with an explicit exception for video chat. The "under 2" formulation belongs to the Canadian Paediatric Society.

How these were checked

• Every figure on this page was read on the publisher's own page. Where a source was a PDF, the text was extracted and read rather than summarised second-hand.
• "Publisher" means the body that produced the number — a peer-reviewed journal, a government department, a regulator. No figure here is taken from another roundup, a press summary, or a page citing someone else.
• Where a number comes from a published abstract rather than full text, or from a small or non-random sample, the caveat says so on the figure itself.
• Commercial app-privacy audits were deliberately excluded: small non-random samples, not peer-reviewed, and commercially motivated. The academic audits and regulatory actions above make the same case from sources that survive scrutiny.
• Two claims we investigated could not be verified to our standard and have been left off rather than published with a hedge. Several widely-repeated claims did not survive checking at all and are listed under "Claims that don't hold up" instead.
• Corrections are welcome. If you believe a figure here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will check it and say so on the page.