Texas can now make Apple and Google check how old you are before you download an app. The Supreme Court just let the rule stand.
The US Supreme Court has refused to block a Texas law aimed at app stores, the Associated Press reports. The rule forces Apple and Google to verify users’ ages and get a parent’s consent before minors download apps or make in-app purchases. Justice Samuel Alito turned the challenge away in a pair of one-sentence orders, according to SCOTUSblog.
The App Store Accountability Act stays in force while the fight runs on in lower courts.
What the law demands
The rule hands the age-checking job to Apple and Google. When a Texan sets up an account, the store must sort them into an age band. The options: under 13, 13 to 15, 16 to 17, or adult. Anyone under 18 needs a linked guardian who signs off on downloads and purchases. App developers pick up their own duties on top.
Texas is not the first. Utah passed a law like this before anyone else, and a wave of states has followed. Supporters call it basic child protection. Critics see a privacy problem in the making. Reliable age checks tend to mean handing over more personal data, not less.
A First Amendment fight
The challenge came from a student group, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, and from the Computer and Communications Industry Association. Its members include the app stores themselves. They argue the law chokes free speech by gating access to lawful content. A Fifth Circuit stay had already let the rule take effect. The Supreme Court has now declined to press pause.
Why it matters
The ruling nudges the US toward a world where the app store, not the website, becomes the internet’s age gate. That is the model Apple and Google have lobbied for, preferring one checkpoint to thousands. It also rhymes with moves abroad.
Britain is reshaping app-store rules. Australia is trialling an under-16 social media ban, and US lawmakers keep pushing kids online-safety bills.
Each shares one hard question. How do you prove a child is a child online without surveilling everyone else? The same court has drawn fresh digital-privacy limits elsewhere, and it recently agreed to weigh Apple’s own app-store powers.
For now, in Texas, the checkpoint is on.
