Supreme Court Lets Texas Enforce App Store Age Verification Law

The US Supreme Court on July 6, 2026 declined to block a Texas law that requires app stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps or make in-app purchases. The unsigned orders, issued on the court’s emergency docket, leave the App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) in force while a First Amendment challenge continues in the lower courts.

The justices turned down applications from the Computer & Communications Industry Association (a tech trade group whose members include Apple and Google) and the advocacy group Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, which had asked the court to reinstate a lower-court order blocking the statute. The challengers argue the law compels speech and unconstitutionally conditions access to protected online content on identity verification. No justice publicly dissented, and none wrote separately, according to SCOTUSblog.

SB 2420, signed by Governor Greg Abbott in 2025, requires app store operators to sort users into one of four age brackets (under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or adult) and to route minors into a parental-consent flow before downloads, purchases, or significant app updates. Enforcement runs through the Texas attorney general under the state’s deceptive trade practices law. US District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin had blocked the measure on December 23, 2025, finding it likely “vague, overly broad” and a restraint on protected speech, but the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed that injunction, allowing the law to take effect in June 2026.

The order extends a run of US court decisions hardening age-verification requirements online. In June 2025, the Supreme Court upheld a separate Texas statute mandating age checks on adult-content websites in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, a 6-3 decision that subjected such requirements to intermediate rather than strict scrutiny. Texas is one of three states (alongside Utah, the first to act, and Louisiana) to enact an App Store Accountability Act, with similar bills advancing in other legislatures. App stores and developers that operate nationally now face a growing patchwork of state age-assurance mandates rather than a single federal standard.

The decision moves age verification from a policy debate into an operational requirement for any company distributing apps to US users. Establishing a user’s age bracket accurately, capturing verifiable parental consent, and doing so without collecting more personal data than necessary is a technical problem many platforms were not built to solve. Self-declared birthdates, the long-standing industry default, no longer satisfy statutes that expect commercially reasonable verification and carry civil penalties for failure. The harder task is meeting these obligations across multiple jurisdictions with differing definitions of a minor and conflicting consent rules, without adding friction that pushes users to abandon sign-up.

Platforms subject to these rules need age-assurance systems built to withstand regulatory scrutiny rather than checkbox compliance. That calls for verification that can estimate a user’s age, confirm identity documents, and record parental consent across markets without retaining unnecessary data. Shufti’s age verification combines facial biometric age estimation with document verification and operates across 240+ countries and territories, and its age-assurance technology is KJM-certified in Germany, one of the world’s strictest regimes for protecting minors online. Companies preparing for state app-store mandates can explore Shufti’s age verification capabilities or request a demo to gauge their readiness.