A coalition of major technology companies has filed a federal lawsuit against Texas over its new App Store Accountability Act, arguing that the measure violates the First Amendment by imposing sweeping age-verification and parental consent requirements.
The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), whose members include Apple and Google, filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. The group said the law “imposes a broad censorship regime on the entire universe of mobile apps,” requiring users to prove their age before downloading any app and mandating parental consent for minors.
“In a misguided attempt to protect minors, Texas has decided to require proof of age before anyone with a smartphone or tablet can download an app,” the CCIA wrote in its complaint. “Anyone under 18 must obtain parental consent for every app and in-app purchase they try to download—from ebooks to email to entertainment.”
The lawsuit argues that the law’s age-rating and parental consent mandates amount to unconstitutional restrictions on free speech. “Our Constitution forbids this,” the filing states. “None of our laws require businesses to “card” people before they can enter bookstores and shopping malls. The First Amendment prohibits such oppressive laws as much in cyberspace as it does in the physical world.”
The Texas App Store Accountability Act, set to take effect January 1, 2026, would require app developers to classify their content by age and notify app stores whenever updates are made. Similar measures in Utah and Louisiana are scheduled to be enforced later in 2025.
A separate lawsuit, brought by a student advocacy group and two Texas minors, also challenges the law. Their attorney, Ambika Kumar of Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, said, “The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity.”
See here for more on the other lawsuit. Both of these were filed around the same time but I didn’t see anything about the CCIA suit until I saw this Reform Austin article. A Google news search didn’t find much else, and several of the stories I found either included or seemed to be entirely about the student group lawsuit. Not sure what was up with that.
The Record has a bit more.
Under the law, users who cannot prove they are older than 18 years old must link their account to that of a parent or guardian. Parents and guardians will be required to prove that they are older than 18 to enable the purchase.
The law applies to nearly all apps, including those providing access to newspapers, public libraries and the Bible. The CCIA argues that requiring age verification and linkage of child and parent accounts violates the First Amendment and invades the privacy of all app users.
“Everyone who creates an account –– essentially everyone with a mobile phone –– is required to have their age verified and to submit sensitive, personal documentation or biometric information before they will be allowed to access protected speech,” the lawsuit says.
CCIA also argues that the law will be ineffective since it will not block minors from accessing the same content on web browsers, desktop computers, smart TVs or offline.
In addition to its age-gating provisions, the law will force app developers to rate whether apps are appropriate for users under age 18.
Utah and Louisiana have enacted similar laws, paving the way for the case to have a broad impact on an accelerating age-gating trend for access to online content.
I didn’t find anything to suggest there’s litigation against Utah’s law, but there is a lawsuit over Louisiana’s. A similar law in Arkansas has been blocked by a federal court, and a law in California that would have banned notifications for minors on social media apps during certain hours and have eventually required age verification for all users to prove they are not children has been blocked by the 9th Circuit. What that means among other things is that if our friend the Fifth Circuit does the state’s bidding here, a trip to SCOTUS is all but guaranteed.
We’ll see if it gets that far. In the meantime, as this plays out, we may all soon feel the effect of these laws.
Starting next year, Texas will require companies like Apple and Google to verify the ages of people that use their app stores, and Apple shared today how it’s going to comply. Starting January 1st, 2026, anyone trying to make a new Apple Account must confirm if they are over 18, and any users under 18 must join a Family Sharing group. Parents and guardians will also be required to give their consent for users under 18 to download apps or to make in-app purchases.
Developers will also have to make changes to comply with the law. Apple already offers a Declared Age Range API that developers can implement to ask users their general age, and the API “will be updated in the coming months to provide the required age categories for new account users in Texas,” Apple says. Apple is also launching new APIs “later this year” that “will enable developers, when they determine a significant change is made to their app, to invoke a system experience to allow the user to request that parental consent be re-obtained.”
Utah and Louisiana have passed similar laws, and Apple says that “similar requirements will come into effect later next year” in those states. Google has also shared guidance about how it will support Google Play developers ahead of the age verification laws going into effect.
Apple has pushed back on app store age verification laws, with CEO Tim Cook calling Texas governor Greg Abbott to try and get changes to Texas’ SB2420 bill. “While we share the goal of strengthening kids’ online safety, we are concerned that SB2420 impacts the privacy of users by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores,” Apple says in today’s notice.
Sounds to me like the laws in these states, if they are upheld, will eventually affect everyone regardless of their own states’ laws. Consider that a reminder that shit like this always breaks containment. The CCIA press release is here, and Ars Technica has more.