Age suitability in AudioChoices

AudioChoices is an interactive audiobook app published by Alek Jałtuszyk. This page is written for a parent or guardian deciding whether it suits a particular young listener, and for anyone — including a store reviewer or a regulator — checking that its age rating is an honest one.

It says what the stories contain, what the app’s age setting does, and, just as plainly, what that setting does not do.

Last updated 14 August 2026. The description of the stories below was checked against the published books on that date, by reading them rather than by recalling them.

Where the app is, and what that means for this page

AudioChoices is on the App Store, for iPhone and iPad. There is an Android build, and it is not listed on Google Play. Everything below about Google, Google Play or Family Link describes how the app behaves and what a parent could use once that listing exists; none of it can be acted on today, and it is marked where it applies rather than quietly dropped. Where the two platforms differ in what the app can know about a listener, both are described, because the difference is the point.

The rating, and why the number moves between countries

On the App Store, AudioChoices is rated 13+. That rating is calculated by Apple from a questionnaire about what the app contains. It is a statement about the app, not a judgement about any individual child.

The same answers produce different numbers in different rating systems, and that is normal rather than a contradiction. On Google Play, one IARC questionnaire produces every regional badge at once — ESRB in the Americas, PEGI in Europe, USK in Germany, ClassInd in Brazil, ACB in Australia, GRAC in Korea — and those bodies weigh the same answers differently. PEGI in particular is frequency-blind about violence: any realistic violence at all reads as PEGI 16, however rare it is. So where a badge comes from PEGI, or from the IARC questionnaire behind it, expect it to sit above Apple’s number.

That is a description of how the systems work, not a prediction of a specific badge in a specific country. Where AudioChoices carries a rating you can see, the store showing it is the authority on what it means.

What the stories actually contain

Twelve books, about 370,000 words of narration: four survival stories, four contemporary dramas, two Greek myths retold, one fantasy siege and one detective story. Most of it is written for teenagers and adults. Two books carry an advisory minimum age of 16; eight carry 13; two carry none at all — one of those a drama about an underpaid school band teacher, with nothing frightening in it anywhere. Those four values (0, 13, 16, 18) are the only ones we use, because they are the only ranges an age signal can describe a listener with.

What a listener will actually meet:

• Confinement, and dread that lasts. The four survival books are built on being trapped with a clock running: a cave tour cut off by a collapse with the water rising, a decommissioned missile silo that turns out not to be empty, a crippled spacecraft with two people aboard and no help within reach, a prison. Characters are injured, exhausted, frightened and out of options for long stretches. This is the register a listener meets most often, and it is the strongest reason the app is rated 13+.
• Violence, mostly fantasy and myth. The fantasy siege is a night-long battle — spears, blades, a dragon, named characters killed. The two Greek myths carry the violence those myths carry: in one, a king swallows his own children whole and keeps them alive inside him; in the other, a young woman is taken down into the land of the dead to be married, with nobody having asked her. Ten of the twelve books contain no battle at all.
• Real-world grief and illness, treated seriously. A mother with dementia and six weeks of funded care. Two parents dead on a Tuesday and a nineteen-year-old deciding whether he can raise his eight-year-old brother. An archivist found at the bottom of a stairwell, and an investigator asked to prove it was not an accident. These are the quietest books on the shelf and the most likely to upset a younger listener, which is not the same thing as frightening one.
• Coercion, and choices with a cost. Adults use position, money and information against people with less of all three. Every book puts a decision to the listener at intervals and then holds them to it; several have endings in which the right-seeming choice still costs somebody something.
• One power tool used as a threat. A captive-bolt stunner, in the missile-silo book. It is pointed at a man, fired into a workbench, and used on an animal.
• Alcohol and tobacco, in passing. A restaurant’s wine list, tobacco used as currency in a prison, a witness smoking outside a loading dock, a village pub as somebody’s workplace. In one Greek myth a man is given a drugged drink and loses several hours to it. None of these is a scene about drinking, and no character is shown drunk.

What is not in the books as they stand — searched for across all twelve rather than assumed:

• No swearing. Not one of the usual words, in about 370,000 words.
• No sexual or romantic content. No sex, no undressing, no seduction, and not a single kiss anywhere in the catalogue.
• No drug use. The drugged drink in the myth above, and a prison sniffer dog mentioned in passing, are the whole of it. No recreational drug appears anywhere.
• No firearms. The only two objects a search turns up are the captive-bolt stunner above and a nail gun that somebody is wrongly accused of stealing.
• No gore and no torture. The word “blood” appears about twenty times in the whole catalogue, and every use is restrained. There is no dwelling on injury and nothing sadistic.

And what is ruled out by policy, whatever gets written next:

• No prolonged, graphic or sadistic violence, and no explicit sexual content or nudity. These are not a rating the app might grow into; they cannot be published on the App Store at all.
• No gambling, no simulated gambling, no loot boxes, and no randomised rewards of any kind.
• No adverts. There is no advertising SDK in the app and no advertising identifier is collected.
• No chat, no messaging, no profiles, no strangers. A listener can give a book a star rating from one to five, and the average is shown on the book; that number is the only thing any listener contributes, and there is no free text anywhere for anyone to write into.
• No open web browsing.

One point worth making, since it is where a description like this usually goes wrong in the generous direction: frequent swearing and frequent weapon use are both permitted inside a 13+ rating, so their absence is not what is holding the number down and their arrival would not push it up. The app is 13+ for sustained dread and confinement, for realistic peril, and for adult subject matter handled seriously. Those are the things to weigh.

AudioChoices does sell books and a subscription through the store’s own purchase system. The section on parental controls below covers how to put an approval step in front of that.

Every book carries its own minimum age

Each book has an advisory minimum age set by its author, and the library offers a listener only the books at or below the age the app has for them. That number is guidance from the person who wrote the book. It is not a classification and not equivalent to a film or game certificate.

One thing it does not do is let a book go further than the app’s own rating. Apple and Google rate an app on the content it contains, not on who can reach it, so a book needing a higher minimum age would raise the rating of the whole app for everybody. Sharing an age with AudioChoices therefore unlocks nothing more mature than what the 13+ rating already describes. The rating is a ceiling over the entire catalogue, and no age setting lifts it.

What that filter is doing today. Of the twelve books on the shelf, two carry an advisory age of 16, eight carry 13, and two carry none at all. A listener the app has as 13 is therefore offered ten of the twelve; a listener it has as 16 or over is offered all of them. Where the app knows nothing about a listener it assumes 13, so the two 16s are hidden by default and have to be reached rather than avoided.

Both 16s are there because of what the books are about rather than because of anything a store made us do — captivity and experimentation on teenagers in one, a cycle of parental violence and an attempted assault in the other. Apple’s own descriptors would allow both at 13+. We would rather not hand them to a thirteen-year-old, so we do not.

How the app gets a listener’s age

There are two routes. Which one a listener ends up on depends partly on the phone and partly on the listener.

Nothing is asked until somebody taps. The app never consults Apple or Google on its own — not at launch, not in the background, not on a schedule. During setup, the age step shows a button reading “Share my age range” with “I’d rather pick it myself” underneath it, and both are live. A listener who does not want their store account consulted can take the second one, and no request is ever made.

From the platform, where the listener asks for it and the phone offers one. On iPhones and iPads running iOS 26 or later, and on Android where Google Play supports it, tapping the button makes the app ask the platform which age range the listener falls into. The device then asks them whether to share it. What comes back is a range and nothing else — “13–15”, “18 or over”. No birth date, no name, no identity document, no account details, and nothing about how they use any other app. The app keeps the bottom of the range, so somebody reported as 13–15 is treated as 13, and it shows on screen which range it received and where that range came from.

A range the listener picks, in every other case. Three buttons — 13–15, 16–17, 18 or over — and nothing checks the answer. That covers a phone with no such feature at all (every iPhone below iOS 26), a phone that had nothing to share, a lookup that failed or timed out, and a listener who simply preferred not to be looked up. Two details worth knowing: 18 or over is pre-selected, so somebody tapping straight through without reading declares 18; and there is no option below 13.

This replaced an age slider on 14 August 2026, and it collects less than the slider did. Nothing in the app has ever needed an exact age — every decision compares the listener against 13, 16 or 18 and nothing else — so asking for 27 or 41 was gathering a more precise fact than any purpose used. The three ranges are the same three the platform answers with, so both routes now produce the same kind of answer and the app cannot tell them apart except by asking where it came from.

One answer skips the picker, and only one. If a listener raises the phone’s own prompt and then declines to share, the app assumes 13 and moves on, rather than turning round and putting the picker in front of somebody who has just said no. The same applies where a store reports that age verification is required and has not been completed. Every other outcome — nothing shared, no such feature, a failure — leads to the picker with 18 or over pre-selected. If the app has no age at all, it assumes 13.

A range can be below 13, and the app takes that at face value rather than rounding it up. In practice that is a Google Play behaviour: Play’s lowest band is 0–12, while the lowest gate Apple is asked about is 13. On an iPhone or iPad, a listener under 13 produces no range at all and lands on the picker, whose lowest option is 13–15. Since the App Store listing is the only one live today, this is a property of the Android build rather than one to rely on now.

Where the phone gave a range, the app goes by the range. Settings has a “Listener age” row that names the range and the account it came from — and on those devices it is not an editor. There is no picker over a shared range, and a range set before the phone ever answered does not raise what the app acts on. A range that looks wrong is corrected in the phone’s own account (on iOS: Settings › [your name] › Personal Information › Age Range for Apps), then re-read with the “Check my age range” control in AudioChoices’ Settings.

Where no range was shared, the age is the listener’s to set, in the same “Listener age” row, at any time. That is every iPhone below iOS 26 and every Android where Google Play has nothing to share — most devices in use today. Checking again never overwrites a number somebody set by hand; if they would rather the phone’s range were used, Settings offers one control that adopts it.

Two limits, stated rather than left out

This is not a parental control, and it is not age verification. The app performs no age check of its own: it asks for no birth date, no document and no account details. Where a range comes from Apple or Google, they established it — possibly from a guardian’s declaration, possibly from a checked ID — and the app sees only the range and a label describing it. Where no range is available, the age is self-declared and unverified.

It decides what is offered, and nothing else. It never gates playback, and it never gates purchases or anything already unlocked. It is not locked behind a passcode, and a listener who wants to change it can do so in a few seconds. It curates the shelf; it is not a barrier, and it is not a substitute for your own judgement.

There are two places where an age set by hand is limited. The first is everywhere: where the phone has shared a range, the app will not act on anything above the bottom of it — so an older setting of 40 beside a confirmed “18 or over” means the app works to 18. The second is narrower: where the platform tells the app that a law requiring age assurance applies to that listener and no range was confirmed, the app will not act on anything above 13. In both cases the listener’s own number is still stored and still shown to them; it is simply not acted on above the limit, and where it is lower than the range it is still what the app works to, because that only ever narrows the shelf. The app never works out where anybody is in order to decide the second limit: no location permission, no IP lookup, no guess from language, time zone or SIM. It relies solely on the platform saying so. (That sentence is about this decision only. The app does read the region already set in the phone’s own settings — Settings › General › Language & Region on iOS — to answer a different question, described in the next section and in section 10 of the Privacy Policy. That is a setting your phone already holds, not a location reading.)

That reliance is also the limit of the second rule, and it is worth setting out plainly rather than summarising. (The first rule needs none of this: it depends on the phone having shared a range and on nothing else.) On iPhones and iPads below iOS 26 there is no such signal at all. On iOS 26.0 and iOS 26.1 the phone offers an age range but not that signal, so on those two releases nothing is capped by the second rule — though on 26.0 and 26.1 the range itself is still shared, and the first rule still applies to it. From iOS 26.2 the phone answers the question and the app acts on the answer, including a “no”, which lifts the limit again. But because the app never re-asks the phone on its own, a device that updates out of 26.0 or 26.1 keeps the old answer until somebody uses “Check my age range” in Settings once — an install set up on either of those two releases stays uncapped after the update until that happens. On Android, Google Play tells the app one thing here and only in one situation — that age verification is required and the listener has not yet completed it with the store. Play has no signal meaning the opposite and stops saying this once the verification is done, so on an Android device where Play has never reported an outstanding verification nothing is capped; where it has, the app keeps that answer. In every case, whatever the app was last told is what stands until “Check my age range” is used in Settings.

The age never leaves the device

Whichever route it came from, the age stays on the phone. It is not sent to any server, it is not attached to the app’s anonymous installation identifier, and it is never used for advertising, marketing or profiling — Apple’s and Google’s own terms for these age features forbid exactly that, and this app does not do it. Asking the phone for a range tells Apple or Google nothing about what anybody listens to.

The age has one further use, entirely on the device: in the regions where the app asks permission before sending any usage data at all, a listener the app has as under 16 is not asked that question, and Google Analytics never starts for them. Which regions those are is decided from the region set in the phone’s own settings, as described above; the age itself is never part of that or any other transmission.

Clearing the app’s data in Settings deletes the age, where it came from, when it was last checked and the range itself. It deliberately keeps one thing: the yes-or-no answer about whether the store says an age check is required here. Without that, clearing and then typing a new age would be a two-step way around the limit described above, since the age row sits on the same screen as the clear control — so it stays, the confirmation dialog says so before anybody clears, and only the store saying otherwise removes it. Clearing also cannot delete the range held by the phone, which belongs to the phone rather than to this app and can be shared again next time.

The full account is in section 14 of the AudioChoices Privacy Policy.

What a parent can actually use

The real controls belong to the platforms, and unlike an in-app setting they are enforced:

• Apple — Screen Time. Settings › Screen Time › Content & Privacy Restrictions sets the highest app rating allowed on the device and can block installing or deleting apps. Through Family Sharing, Ask to Buy can be turned on for a child’s account so that downloads and purchases come to you for approval. Exactly what each setting does is Apple’s to define and Apple’s to change; check Apple’s own Family Sharing and Screen Time documentation rather than taking this page’s word for it. What is worth knowing in general is that an app’s rating and a parent’s approval are separate mechanisms — a rating on its own does not always stop a download.
• Google — Family Link. Applies only once AudioChoices is listed on Google Play, which it is not today. Family Link can set content-rating limits for Google Play and can be configured to require a parent’s approval for downloads and for purchases. As above, the details are Google’s, and its own documentation is the place to confirm them.
• Purchase approval. AudioChoices has in-app purchases. If you do not want a child spending, turn on purchase approval in the store account — the app’s age setting has no effect on purchases whatsoever.
• Volume limits. Worth setting for any listening app: the reduce-loud-sounds setting on iOS, or the equivalent on Android.

This page deliberately does not tell you that AudioChoices is suitable for your child. Whether sustained dread, confinement, real grief and choices with a cost are right for a particular thirteen-year-old is a judgement only you can make. What is written above is meant to give you enough to make it, including the parts that do not flatter the app.

Questions, or a book that seems wrongly rated

Tell us, and we will look at it. The AudioChoices support page has the ways to get in touch, or write directly to alekgameshelp2@gmail.com.

The binding texts are section 14 of the AudioChoices Privacy Policy and section 12 of the AudioChoices Terms of Use. This page is a plain-language summary of them and adds nothing to them. Where it and they differ, they govern and this page is what gets fixed.