Apple TV is finally catching up to a feature the rest of the streaming world has had for years. iOS 27.2 beta 1, iPadOS 27.2 beta 1, and macOS 27.2 beta 1 released today, brings user profiles to the Apple TV app for the first time.
Profiles have existed on tvOS for a few years, letting households switch between different viewing histories on the television. But tvOS 26.2 last December added two upgrades that made the feature far more useful for families, and those same upgrades are what is now landing on iPhone.
Profiles No Longer Need an Apple Account
Before tvOS 26.2, adding a new profile meant setting up a full Apple Account, often through Family Sharing. That was overkill for a guest watching for one evening or a toddler who has no business owning an Apple ID.
tvOS 26.2 removed that requirement, and iOS 27.2 carries it over to iPhone. Creating a new profile now only needs a name, an icon, and a yes or no answer to whether the profile belongs to a child. Profiles created this way can be upgraded to a full Apple Account later, or deleted entirely, with no data loss to the main account.
What Kid Profiles Actually Restrict, and What They Don’t
Selecting a child’s profile limits the Apple TV app to shows and movies matching a chosen content rating, from TV-Y up through TV-MA, plus an “allow all TV content” option for parents who want no restriction at all. That restriction only applies inside the Apple TV app itself. Other apps on the iPhone stay fully accessible under a kid profile, and the App Store remains open too, so profiles are not a substitute for iOS’s separate parental control settings.
- Profiles sync across devices, including third-party smart TVs running the Apple TV app
- A “Don’t Show This Again” button skips the profile picker entirely for single-user households
- Content restrictions apply only within the Apple TV app, not system-wide
- Kid profiles hide adult content in both the Store and Library sections of the app
Our Take
This is a smaller feature than the Health app redesign or the Siri AI language expansion, but it is the one I think regular families will notice fastest. Handing a kid an iPhone to watch something is far more common than handing them the remote for the living room television.
A parent who assumes a kid profile locks down the whole iPhone will be surprised to find every other app still wide open. This is an Apple TV app feature, not a parental control system, and Apple should be clearer about that distinction once this reaches a public release.
