• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, May 28, 2025

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Tuesday signed a bill that requires app distributors like Google and Apple to verify users' ages and block minors under 18 from downloading apps without parental permission.

The App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) will take effect January 1, unless blocked in court.

Utah passed a similar law in March, and lawmakers in Louisiana advanced a comparable bill earlier this month. On the federal level, U.S. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Representative John James (R-Michigan) recently introduced a nationwide version of the measure.

The tech industry-funded policy group Chamber of Progress opposed the Texas law, arguing that arguing that age-verification mandates as well as parental consent requirements for apps are unconstitutional.

“The First Amendment safeguards both the right to speech and access to information and this law sweeps so broadly as to infringe on both the rights of minors and adults,” the group stated Tuesday.

Earlier this year, Google separately criticized the Utah bill for several reasons, including that it could prevent teens from accessing useful apps.

“By requiring app stores to obtain parental consent for every single app download, it dictates how parents supervise their kids and potentially cuts teens off from digital services like educational or navigation apps,” Google's Kareem Ghanem, director of public policy, wrote in March.

In recent years, numerous states have passed laws that either restrict teens' use of social media, or regulate the ability of Meta, TikTok and other social platforms to serve content to teens.

Many of those laws are currently facing court challenges, and so far judges have blocked all or parts of those laws in Ohio, Arkansas, Utah, Texas and California.

The Supreme Court weighed in on parental consent laws in 2011, when it struck down California law that would have prohibited the sale of violent video games to minors, without parental permission.