- Tension: Four states passed nearly identical laws requiring app stores to verify a user’s age before a minor can download an app, and each state treated passage as the finish line — when passage turned out to be the easy part.
- Noise: Because all four laws share the same basic design, it’s tempting to treat their fate as one storyline — either app store age verification is happening or it isn’t — when the real story is that one state’s law is now live while the other three are stuck in different kinds of holding patterns.
- Direct Message: Texas is first not because its law was written any differently from the other three, but because an appeals court applied a lower level of constitutional scrutiny than the law’s critics argued it deserved — and the Supreme Court let that stand, for now.
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Apple and Google started verifying the ages of app store users in Texas in early June, within days of a federal appeals court putting the law’s injunction on hold, and before any court had finished ruling on whether the law requiring it is constitutional. Three other states passed laws built on the same basic idea. None of the other three is enforceable yet.
Four states, one design, four different outcomes
App store accountability acts require app stores to verify a user’s age category and obtain verifiable parental consent before a minor can download an app, buy one, or make an in-app purchase. Four states have passed one: Texas, Utah, Louisiana, and Alabama, the fourth to enact the model, according to a June 2026 client alert from law firm Loeb & Loeb. As of this summer, Texas’s is the only one of the four actually in force. Utah’s has been delayed to May 2027 after lawmakers stripped the state of its own enforcement power, leading both sides to drop the litigation. Louisiana’s was pushed back a full year, to July 2027, by its own governor. Alabama’s law doesn’t take effect until January 2027 regardless of any litigation.
Texas: the law that’s actually live
Texas’s SB 2420 was set to take effect January 1, 2026. A federal district judge, Robert Pitman, blocked it beforehand in two separate challenges — one from Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, one from the Computer & Communications Industry Association — ruling the law likely violated the First Amendment. Texas appealed, and in late May the Fifth Circuit stayed Pitman’s injunctions, letting the law take effect while the appeal continued. The challengers asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the block. On July 6, the justices declined, in a pair of brief, unsigned orders with no public dissents, leaving Texas free to enforce SB 2420 for now.
Why a lower bar of scrutiny made the difference
The Fifth Circuit’s written opinion, issued in early June, turned on which constitutional test applied. Pitman had applied strict scrutiny, the standard used when a law restricts speech. The appeals court instead applied the more permissive intermediate scrutiny, reasoning that app store listings are commercial transactions rather than protected expression — as the opinion put it, the “payment” for a free app is the user’s data, so browsing an app store is inherently commercial activity. Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, a longtime critic of age-verification mandates, argued in his case analysis that this reasoning stretches the definition of commercial speech well past how courts have applied it elsewhere, comparing it to treating every organic Google search result as advertising because Google sells ads elsewhere on the page. Whether that reasoning holds is still being litigated — the Supreme Court’s July 6 orders left the law in effect without ruling on the merits.
The practical effect arrived faster than the legal one. According to Goldman’s tracking of the companies’ public statements, both Apple and Google began complying with the age-verification requirement within days of the Fifth Circuit’s stay, before the written opinion explaining the court’s reasoning was even released.
Utah, Louisiana, and Alabama: delayed by different mechanisms
The other three states didn’t lose in court so much as they stepped back from the fight. Utah’s law had an effective date of May 6, 2026, but during litigation brought by the Computer & Communications Industry Association, lawmakers amended the bill to strip Utah’s own enforcement power, leaving only a private right of action. That change led both sides to agree to drop the case — and pushed the bulk of the law’s effective date to May 6, 2027. Louisiana’s law was due to take effect July 1, 2026, the same day as Connecticut, Arkansas, and Utah’s privacy law changes, but the state’s governor signed a separate bill delaying it a full year. Alabama’s, the newest of the four, was written from the start with a January 2027 effective date.
What “in effect” doesn’t mean yet
None of this settles whether app store age verification is constitutional. The Fifth Circuit’s ruling on Texas came from a preliminary posture, and the underlying challenges to SB 2420 are still working through the courts. Utah, Louisiana, and Alabama’s laws could still face the same First Amendment challenges Texas’s did once they take effect. For now, Texas is simply the one state where compliance is no longer optional, and Apple and Google’s decision to fall in line before the legal questions were settled means that whatever happens next in the appeals court, the age-verification infrastructure it required is already built.
