Nearly a quarter of UK five-to-seven-year-olds now have their own smartphone

> Over half of children under 13 used social media, contrary to most of the big platforms' rules, and many admitted to lying to gain access to new apps and services.

> Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta which owns WhatsApp and Instagram, has previously suggested that he favours requiring app-stores to check the ages of users.

this is the first time I heard about this and I agree with this angle. App-stores charge a fee to act as a middleman. They handle distribution, payment, and offer account authentication, it would be good if they also handled age verification in a way that can't easily be circumvented (i.e. lying as mentioned in the article) rather than handing the hot potato to app developers to deal with.