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Singapore's first app-store safety audit: 65 harmful apps removed, 24 misrated apps corrected
Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority published its first Online Safety Assessment Report on October 24: after checking more than 7,000 apps across five app stores, it found 65 apps with harmful content breaching the stores' own policies and 24 adult apps wrongly rated as suitable for children, all removed or re-rated only after the regulator notified the stores.
Why it matters
This is Singapore's first formal safety assessment of app stores, and it exposes a blind spot: the stores' own review did not catch these apps first. For parents, the point is not whether safety measures exist, but that harmful content and wrong age ratings were genuinely live.
Full report
Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) published its inaugural Online Safety Assessment Report for Designated App Distribution Services on October 24, covering April 1 to December 31, 2025, the first months after the Code of Practice for Online Safety for App Distribution Services took effect in March 2025.
The authority checked more than 7,000 apps across the five designated stores: Apple's App Store, Google Play, Huawei's AppGallery, Samsung's Galaxy Store and the Microsoft Store. It found 65 apps with harmful content breaching the stores' own policies, including 59 with sexual content, four with violent content and two facilitating vice and organised crime; another 24 apps carrying content meant for adults 18 and over had been given a lower age rating, and all have since been re-rated 18+.
By store, the 65 removals break down as Apple 30, Google Play 10, Huawei 11, Microsoft 3 and Samsung 11. Examples cited include nudification tools that use AI to turn an ordinary photo into an explicit image, and games featuring murder themes or gambling with cryptocurrency or real-money payouts.
IMDA found no systemic breach of the code and said all five stores have baseline safety measures, but gaps remain in app review, age ratings and handling user reports: Google and Samsung did not notify users within six months when an app they had downloaded was removed, and both have agreed to improve; a loophole let some under-18 users bypass Huawei's age-assurance method, which Huawei has committed to fix, while Microsoft has put in an interim fix.
On next steps, the Ministry of Digital Development and Information consulted more than 2,000 parents and young people from June to August; most backed age-appropriate access with safeguards rather than an outright ban, and the government expects to table legislation in early 2027 requiring age checks, with default limits on infinite scroll, autoplay and messages from strangers under consideration.
One gap to note: IMDA did not name the individual apps or publish how many people in Singapore had downloaded or used them, so the scale of actual exposure cannot yet be estimated.
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