A Win Without an Opinion
On July 6, 2026, the Supreme Court declined to intervene in two emergency applications — Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton (No. 25A1389) and Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton (No. 25A1390) — asking it to block Texas's App Store Accountability Act while litigation over the law continues. The orders were brief, unsigned, and issued without noted dissent (SCOTUSblog). That is the entire ruling. The Court said nothing about whether the law is constitutional — only that Texas may keep enforcing it while the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit works through the merits at an expedited hearing.
That procedural modesty matters less than the practical result. Senate Bill 2420, signed by Governor Greg Abbott on May 27, 2025, requires any "app store" — in practice, Apple's App Store and Google Play — to determine every Texas user's age category (child under 13, younger teen 13–15, older teen 16–17, or adult) and, for anyone under 18, link the account to a parent who must approve every download and in-app purchase (SB 2420 text; Texas Tribune). A district court in Austin preliminarily enjoined the law on December 23, 2025, warning it would restrict "a vast universe of speech" by forcing Texans to prove their age before downloading practically anything (district court order). The Fifth Circuit stayed that injunction without an opinion, and the law has been live since late May.
The Case for the Law, Stated Fairly
Texas's position is not frivolous. App-level age gates — the checkbox a 12-year-old clicks to claim they're 18 — do nothing, and platform-level parental controls have existed for years without denting rates of minors on apps their parents never approved. Centralizing verification at the two dominant app stores is, in principle, a more efficient chokepoint than asking thousands of individual developers to build their own age-assurance systems, which is exactly what several state social-media laws have required with worse results. Twenty-seven state attorneys general made this case directly in a June 23 amicus brief, arguing SB 2420 "regulates commercial transactions, not expression" and that voluntary industry safeguards "blink reality" given documented rates of child engagement with age-inappropriate apps (Biometric Update). Parents do have a legitimate interest in knowing what their kids are installing, and a single, app-store-level control point is a coherent way to deliver that.
Why the Fifth Circuit's Path There Should Worry Everyone
The problem is not the goal; it's the mechanism the Fifth Circuit blessed to get there. To uphold the law under a lenient standard, the panel reasoned that app store listings are "commercial speech" — subject only to intermediate scrutiny — because apps involve data exchange or monetization, regardless of whether money changes hands. As Santa Clara law professor Eric Goldman points out, that logic would also render every Google search result or free news article "commercial," since ranking and personalization also monetize data; it ignores that plenty of apps, from government services to nonprofit tools, collect nothing at all (Technology & Marketing Law Blog). That is a doctrinal shortcut, not an analysis — and it is now binding precedent across three states while the case proceeds.
The First Amendment concern is compounded by a privacy one. CCIA's litigation position captures it well: people "should not have to turn over personal data to access the internet any more than they should show government identification to enter a bookstore" (Texas Tribune). SB 2420 requires Apple and Google to collect age-verifying data — potentially including driver's license information — from every Texas user, adult and minor alike, to download apps that have nothing to do with adult content: weather apps, transit apps, government forms. That builds a concentrated store of sensitive identity data at exactly the companies Attorney General Ken Paxton has separately sued and fined billions of dollars for mishandling personal data. A regime that mandates the collection it elsewhere punishes is not proportionate regulation; it is a tension the law's authors have not resolved.
A Patchwork, Not a National Standard
Texas is currently the only state actually enforcing an App Store Accountability Act. Utah — the first to pass one, in March 2025 — delayed its effective date to May 2027 after amendments; Louisiana pushed its own start to July 2027; Alabama's, enacted in February 2026, has not yet taken effect (Future of Privacy Forum). Each version differs on enforcement mechanism, private rights of action, and what counts as an "app store." If the Fifth Circuit affirms on the merits this fall, expect the other three to switch on and more states to follow — each with its own verification standard, creating exactly the compliance patchwork that pushes smaller developers out of Texas markets while barely inconveniencing Apple and Google's compliance departments.
The Proportionate Alternative Still Exists
None of this requires abandoning child safety as a goal. A narrower rule — age assurance only for apps that are themselves age-restricted (gambling, dating, adult content), rather than blanket ID-linking for every download — would achieve most of the child-protection benefit without conscripting app stores into verifying the age of adults buying calculator apps. That the Fifth Circuit didn't have to reach for a strained commercial-speech theory to get there is the real story: the shortcut it took now sits one Supreme Court merits docket away from becoming the national template.