Apple’s App Store appears to be suffering from a wider display bug than first thought, with internal-looking labels appearing in place of both app categories and age ratings.
The Apple Post spotted the issue on iPhone on September 30, where information that would normally be presented as simple, customer-friendly labels is instead exposing what appear to be raw identifiers used behind the App Store interface.
On The Apple Post’s own App Store listing, the app’s News category is currently displayed as “MZGenre.News” both underneath the app name and in the Category section of the product page.
The age rating is also broken.
Instead of showing the app’s normal age classification, the App Store is displaying “AppsAgeRa” followed by “Years,” suggesting another internal or localization string is being surfaced directly to customers rather than being converted into the intended age-rating text.
The problem isn’t limited to The Apple Post.
Search results seen by The Apple Post show Apple’s own Sports app displaying “MZGenre.Sports,” while other third-party news and sports apps are showing similar “MZGenre” category labels.
That makes it unlikely that the issue is being caused by metadata submitted by an individual developer.
“MZGenre” has historically appeared in Apple’s underlying App Store category metadata, with identifiers such as “MZGenre.News” and “MZGenre.Sports” corresponding to the News and Sports categories customers would normally see.
Under normal circumstances, users shouldn’t need to know those identifiers exist.
The appearance of “AppsAgeRa” at the same time is particularly notable because it suggests the problem isn’t confined to the App Store’s category system. Multiple pieces of storefront metadata appear to be failing to render their normal user-facing labels.
The app’s actual metadata doesn’t appear to have changed. The Apple Post remains categorized as a News app, and there is no indication that its age rating itself has been altered.
Instead, the issue appears to affect how the App Store is presenting that information.
The Apple Post has observed the incorrect category labels both in App Store search results and on individual app product pages, while the malformed age-rating text is visible on the product page.
It’s currently unclear how widely the issue is affecting users, whether it is restricted to particular countries, languages, App Store storefronts, or versions of iOS, or when Apple will fix it.
There is also no indication that developers need to update their apps or make changes in App Store Connect.
Because much of the App Store interface and storefront data can be changed server-side, Apple may be able to correct the problem without releasing an iOS software update.
Until then, the bug is giving some users an unusual glimpse at labels and identifiers that would normally remain hidden behind the App Store’s interface.