The latest Windows Family Safety improvements are part of a broader effort to create safer, age-appropriate digital experiences for kids and families. As we’ve recently outlined, Microsoft Family has been on a focused journey to raise the quality of the everyday offering that parents and kids rely on — and that journey started by listening to you. We gathered feedback from families and let it guide our priorities, month after month.   The result is a steady stream of meaningful fixes we continue to iterate on:  

• Parental approvals for offerings like screen-time extensions, app access, and purchases now happen faster, so kids aren’t left waiting and parents stay in control.
• We restored clear visibility into web and app activity so parents can trust what they see in their reports.
• Made spending more transparent, with wallet balances.
• We also gave adults in a family more control over their own experience, making it far easier to add, manage, or leave a family group 

We know these areas have presented pain points, and while we've made progress, we know some of you may still run into issues. We're continuing to improve and will continue to listen to your feedback as we improve the experience.  

Parental control: Faster and reliable approval flows 

Parents and children may have experienced inconsistent and noticeable delays while approving children requests such as app access, screen time extensions, and purchase approvals. During these delays, children are unable to access the requested content or continue their activities, while parents are left uncertain whether their approval has been received and applied.  Parental approvals for app access, screen time extensions, and purchases now happen faster than before, reducing wait times and frustration for parents and kids alike.  

Activity reporting: full app coverage 

Some parents noticed that certain apps were missing from activity reports, making it difficult to fully understand how their child was using their device. Activity reporting now includes broader app coverage across all applications used on a child's PC, providing a more complete and trustworthy view. Additional improvements to usage time accuracy are also on the way.  Both parent and children will have the broader view of apps used and time spend.  

Family funding balance after top-up 

Family funding balance was not reflecting proper updated balance but now this issue has been addressed, and parents can now easily manage the funds for their children.   Each of these improvements came from a real family experience — from issues parents told us mattered most: speed, accuracy, control, transparency, and peace of mind.  This is the compounding effect of a team that treats every piece of customer feedback as a commitment to do better. Thank you to every parent who shared their voice; you’ve shaped this product, and we’re just getting started.  All of the above fixes are available in the latest versions of the Family Safety mobile app both iOS and Android are available. You can also access Family Safety on the web by visiting: https://account.microsoft.com/family/  

What’s next 

We also know the journey is not over. While we have made important progress, some families may still run into issues, and we want to hear about them.  If something is not working the way you expect, please reach out to us at familysafetyfeedback@microsoft.com. That inbox is more than a contact point — it is an open invitation from our team to yours. Your feedback helps us understand what families are facing today so we can fix issues at the earliest and keep improving.  Thank you to every parent who shared their voice. You have shaped this product, and you will continue to shape what comes next.  We have been listening. We have been fixing. And we will keep going.

Our children and teens are growing up in a digital world where apps, games, and AI-powered tools are part of how they learn, play, create, and connect. For parents and educators, that brings both opportunity and responsibility: digital experiences should help young people explore with confidence while supporting their wellbeing, building healthy habits, respecting their privacy, and providing protections that are appropriate for their age.  At Microsoft, we believe safety should be easier for families to understand and easier for developers to build into experiences for children to use. On Windows, that starts with the account. Microsoft account is a trusted foundation through which Windows brings age-appropriate protections and parental choices into more of the digital experiences encountered by children and teens every day. A child’s account should help unlock safer, more age-appropriate experiences wherever they use Windows. This is the first in a series of posts on family safety on Windows. Over the coming months I’ll share what we're building — in the account, in the platform, and in the tools we provide to parents, educators, and developers. As Pavan recently shared, Family is a key focus area in our commitment to improving Windows quality. We'll build in the open: shipping new capabilities, listening closely to what families tell us, and refining as we learn. 

From account to safer experiences 

Every experience on Windows starts with identity, and for consumers, that foundation is the Microsoft account (MSA).  MSA enables Windows to understand key context about the user in a consistent and privacy-conscious way: 

• Whether the user is a child, teen, or adult 
• Whether parental controls or consent apply 
• Whether age verification has been completed 

This creates a simple, scalable model:  User account → age signal → age-appropriate experience and controls  Because this foundation is tied to the account, protections are designed to follow the user across Windows and apps, creating safer experiences consistently, not just in individual features. This enables product experiences to support a user’s stage of life. Protections are matched to children, teens, and adults. 

Extending safety across the ecosystem with the Windows Age APIs 

As experiences expand across apps, services, and AI, one challenge becomes clear: how can these experiences consistently understand and respect a user’s age?  To address this, Windows is introducing a new platform capability: the Windows Age API.  This API brings age awareness beyond the operating system by making it available across the entire Windows ecosystem so that apps and services can deliver age-appropriate experiences using the same trusted foundation. By making age awareness available as a platform capability, Windows helps developers build safeguards into experiences from the start rather than placing the burden on children and families to manage protections app by app.  The Windows Age API offers the following capabilities: 

• GetUserAgeRangeAsync: Provides non-personally identifiable age group categories for apps to utilize in providing safe and age-appropriate user experiences, while protecting the date of birth data and overall privacy of users. Age groupings available via the API include- under 10, 10-12, 13-15, 16-17, 18+.
• GetAgeVerificationStatusAsync: Provides verified age status for scenarios when self-reported age is not sufficient.
• CheckAgeStatusAsync: Extends the functionality of the legacy CheckUserAgeConsentGroupAsync API to offer child, minor, or adult classification globally and as defined by regional policies.

These signals are designed to protect privacy: 

• Apps receive only the age-related signal needed for the experience and not sensitive personal data such as full date of birth
• Users remain in control through consent and platform-level controls
• Age information is handled consistently at the platform level to reduce unnecessary sharing and fragmentation 

This enables a new level of consistency across Windows experiences. Apps can recognize when a user is under a certain age and adjust features accordingly, helping create safer, more appropriate interactions without requiring manual setup. This platform approach also helps make protections more consistent and accessible, so safer experiences do not depend on whether a family discovers or configures controls in each individual app.  Just as importantly, this extends to emerging experiences, including AI, where applying age-appropriate safeguards is increasingly important as innovation continues to evolve.  By making this a platform capability, Windows drives safety which is built-in and available across apps, services, and new scenarios.   For more details, including developer guidance, check out the Windows Age API documentation found at https://aka.ms/windows-age-api. 

Building toward high-confidence age assurance 

In many cases, understanding age is not enough. Increasingly, certain experiences require high confidence that a user is an adult.  To support this, Microsoft is expanding age assurance through the Microsoft account using Microsoft Age Verification (MAV), a centralized platform that enables users to verify their age once and use that status across Microsoft experiences. Developers can access this verified status through Windows Age APIs.   Age verification is already available in Microsoft Storefronts in Singapore, Brazil, and Australia. As more regions around the world expand regulatory requirements for age verification, Microsoft will add support for those geographies and product scenarios.  MAV creates a simple, consistent model:  Verify once → use everywhere  Verified status is stored with the Microsoft account and can be used across Windows and apps to enable appropriate experiences, helping reduce friction while improving safety.  

Making safety clearer from the start 

We’re also improving how parental controls are surfaced during device setup, so families can more easily understand available protections and make informed choices from the very beginning.  In regions such as France and others, Windows is raising the visibility of parental controls and consent experiences during setup, designed to increase awareness of the available offerings and enabling early application by parents.  

Family Safety and Parental Controls 

With Family Safety built into Windows, parents can set up a child's device and manage screen time, apps, and content in one place. Over the past six months, we’ve focused on making those everyday moments more dependable – faster parental approvals, clearer activity reporting, and more overall control – guided by what parents told us mattered most. You can read more about what’s improved and what’s coming next here: Listening to families. Improving Microsoft Family. 

Raising the bar for digital safety 

Digital safety must be built into the platform—not added on later.  With Microsoft account as the foundation, and with investments like the Windows Age API expanded age assurance, and available parental controls, Windows is working to support a safer digital environment that is also age-appropriate, privacy-conscious, and easier for families to navigate.  Our goal is to help create experiences where safety, privacy, and participation can work together across the Windows ecosystem. 

Availability 

The Windows Age APIs are broadly available to Windows Insiders now and will be available to all Windows users soon. The CheckAgeStatusAsync API will be available with a future update.

Breakthroughs in computing become real through the experiences developers create. Our goal is to have Windows be the best platform for developers. That means pairing the latest in hardware innovation with software optimized for development. At Build 2026, we introduced a developer-optimized Windows 11 experience to build and ship faster and shared how Windows is becoming the open platform for secure agentic experiences. Today, we're taking the next step with Project Zenith, a ready-to-code distraction-free Windows experience on developer-class devices with 64 GB+ unified memory and 250+ GB/s memory bandwidth, so developers can jump right in. Project Zenith will first become available with AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo, with more devices from our OEM and silicon partners available in the coming months. Project Zenith devices come with a preconfigured Windows setup for development, and a set of tools curated for what developers reach first.  On these devices, developers can run 30B+ parameter models locally and unmetered - accelerating experimentation while helping reduce reliance on metered cloud tokens. Project Zenith represents Windows at its best - listening to developers, responding with purpose and working across our ecosystem to raise the bar for what a developer PC can be.

Improving the baseline Windows 11 experience

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been dedicated to making Windows 11 more performant, reliable and refined across day-to-day experiences. From Search to File Explorer, and everyday memory usage, Windows is becoming faster, calmer, and more polished with more control over the experiences you care about most. Project Zenith devices will benefit from all these improvements, while delivering an optimized developer environment you’ve been asking for.

Ready to code out of the box

Project Zenith comes with a set of pre-installed tools spanning languages and runtimes, source control, and productivity tools. Windows Terminal and Visual Studio Code are pinned to the Taskbar by default, putting your favorite tools within immediate reach. We’ve also pre-configured Windows Settings for coding across File Explorer, Search, Start, and the Taskbar. File Explorer shows file extensions, hidden files, the full path in the title bar, and the details pane, with long-path support enabled. Recently used files and folders and sync provider tips are turned off for a cleaner workspace. In Search and Start, Command Palette is enabled, while Start menu tips and account notifications are turned off to reduce distractions. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) has become foundational for running Linux workloads on Windows. Last year we open-sourced WSL. Building on that momentum at Build 2026, we integrated WSL more deeply into Windows with WSL containers to provide a built-in way to create, run, and interact with Linux containers directly on Windows. Together, with Project Zenith, these choices create a calm, and meaningful starting point for development. Project Zenith is not about prescribing a single workflow. You can continue to configure, extend, and personalize your environment around the tools, languages, and frameworks you prefer. It is about beginning from a better baseline, shaped by the settings and tools developers reach for first, so a new device works with you to accelerate your workflows.

Secure platform for agents on developer-class hardware

We’re entering a new era of software development. Agentic applications are becoming more common, and developers need a secure foundation for building and running them. At Build 2026, we shared how Windows is evolving to provide exactly that – combining OS-enforced identity, containment with Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), and enterprise-grade manageability for agents.  Project Zenith devices will benefit from these platform investments from day one, providing a secure environment for developing and running agents. As AI models become more powerful, agentic coding workflows demand continuous compute. By shifting some of that intelligence to the edge, we are achieving token economics and transforming the developer experience: frontier models tackle frontier problems, while everything else runs locally at scale. With 64 GB+ of unified memory and 250 GB/s+ of memory bandwidth, Project Zenith devices enable developers to run capable coding models locally and unmetered, helping lower token costs.

Project Zenith is just the beginning

Over the past year, we have continued to evolve Windows around how development happens today. From WSL and Windows Developer Configurations to Intelligent Terminal and expanded on-device AI capabilities, each investment is focused on helping developers stay in control and build faster.  Project Zenith brings together the work happening across the Windows platform into a tailored experience on new developer-class PCs. Project Zenith also reflects how Windows moves forward with our ecosystem. By working with our OEM partners, we give developers choice across devices and performance tiers while preserving the ready-to-code experience. The hardware may vary, but the developer promise is consistent - powerful for modern development, thoughtfully configured and ready for developers from the start. Project Zenith is the result of listening to developers about what they need from Windows today, and where they want the platform to go next. As AI continues to transform software development, we are committed to evolving Windows alongside the community that builds on it. We are excited to see what you will build, making Windows the platform where the next generation of applications, agents, and AI experiences come to life.

In a significant milestone for the platform, Microsoft and NVIDIA recently announced NVIDIA RTX Spark. These new devices are the most powerful and efficient, thin-and-light Windows PC ever, built with the Arm architecture. In the fall of 2026, devices from Microsoft Surface, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo, and MSI will be available. NVIDIA's entry into the Windows on Arm silicon family joins the Qualcomm Snapdragon X series of chipsets that have already established Windows on Arm as the premium experience across Microsoft Surface Copilot+ PCs. The market is sending a clear signal: more silicon providers and more OEM partners are investing in Windows on Arm because customer demand is growing for these powerful and efficient Windows devices and experiences.   Alongside the expanding PC landscape, the Windows app ecosystem continues to grow rapidly. As powerful Arm-based devices reach more customers, this motivates developers to build and optimize for the platform. Consequently, as the app catalog grows, customers have even more reason to choose Windows on Arm hardware. That virtuous cycle is now clearly in motion. The app catalog growth is evident in the Works on Windows on Arm site. This site catalogs over 7000 verified apps and games available for Windows on Arm and is built with compatibility data from Microsoft. Given the breadth of Arm-capable hardware available from multiple silicon providers and the depth of the app catalog, Windows on Arm has become a first-class platform for any workload.   App Assure, Microsoft's app compatibility program, with its dedicated Arm Advisory Service, continues to expand the Windows on Arm ecosystem. We continue working side by side with a diverse set of software development companies to bring their apps to the Windows on Arm catalog, ensuring that no customer is left behind. The goal of this blog is to share App Assure's latest progress report: a roundup of some of the most notable new additions to the Windows on Arm app portfolio since our previous update. 

STEM and education apps

This is a rapidly expanding category that demands its own section. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) as well as education tools all play a critical role in how people learn in classrooms, research environments, or via independent study. As Windows on Arm devices become more prevalent, developers in this space now recognize the opportunity to reach learners and professionals who value portable, power-efficient devices without sacrificing performance. The growing number of STEM and education apps now available reflects increasing investment aligned with these needs and the growing adoption of Windows on Arm devices by educational customers. [caption id="attachment_57881" align="alignnone" width="931"] Recent STEM and education apps available on Windows on Arm devices[/caption]

Security apps

Security remains foundational for Windows customers, and it spans far more than a single tool or workload. Modern environments require layered protection across endpoints, consistent device management, and secure connectivity, especially as work increasingly happens across hybrid, mobile, and distributed environments.  Arm-based devices are designed with security at the core, integrating hardware, firmware, and software protections to help defend against modern threats. In addition to the built-in security features, strong support for Windows on Arm in endpoint protection, endpoint management, VPN and Zero Trust solutions helps ensure that customers can adopt these devices without compromising their security posture.   Our previous update showcased well-known apps from companies including Norton, CrowdStrike, and McAfee in the Endpoint Protection space; VMware, Beyond Trust, and Cisco in the Endpoint Management space; and Nord, Zscaler, and Palo Alto Networks in the VPN and Zero Trust space. The continued expansion of the Windows on Arm security app ecosystem, as seen below, highlights how software vendors are aligning with customer expectations for secure, manageable Arm‑based deployments. [caption id="attachment_57875" align="alignnone" width="967"] Recent security apps available on Windows on Arm devices[/caption]

Productivity apps

Productivity apps remain the cornerstone of how people get work done on Windows. Whether managing projects, collaborating with teammates, organizing information, or communicating across teams, these apps are essential to our customers’ daily work. The growing list of productivity apps now available reflects both customer demand and increasing momentum from developers building with Arm as a first-class Windows platform. The new apps listed below join those previously announced from industry leaders such as Google, Adobe, Slack, Trello, and Dropbox. [caption id="attachment_57868" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Recent productivity apps available on Windows on Arm devices[/caption]

Creativity, social media and entertainment apps

Windows devices are as important for work as they are for expression, connection and entertainment. From creative tools to social platforms and media experiences, these apps enable users to create, share and unwind throughout their day. Developers continue to bring rich, engaging experiences to Arm-based devices, ensuring users don’t have to choose between productivity and creativity. Our previous update saw brands such as Camtasia, Blender and Figma release Arm apps. Below are the latest additions. [caption id="attachment_57869" align="alignnone" width="1368"] Recent creativity, social media and entertainment apps available on Windows on Arm devices[/caption] The takeaway is clear: Windows on Arm is no longer defined by potential, but by a rapidly expanding ecosystem of devices with apps available across workloads that customers depend on most. As developers continue to invest in Arm-native experiences and compatibility, customers gain more choices, flexibility, and confidence in adopting the next generation of Windows devices. As the ecosystem continues to expand, the Microsoft App Assure team is ready to assist software developers interested in bringing their apps to Windows on Arm. Through our Arm Advisory Service, we offer expert guidance, technical workshops, code samples, and an escalation path to Microsoft engineers ready to assist with software development. Reach out to us here to learn more. Finally, don’t forget to bookmark https://worksonwoa.com/ for a comprehensive and continuously updated list of all the apps available on Windows on Arm devices.

Reading and resources on the expanding Windows on Arm ecosystem

• Works on Windows on Arm
• Empowering the future: The expanding Arm app ecosystem for Copilot+ PCs
• Introducing a powerful new chapter for Windows PCs, accelerated by NVIDIA RTX Spark
• Fall 2025 Windows Musician Technology and Arm64 Update
• Accelerating Arm momentum in Japan with App Assure
• Advancing print readiness across the Windows on Arm ecosystem