Apple on Wednesday provided a detailed account of the policy changes it will implement in its App Store to comply with a new Texas state law that requires app stores to verify a user’s age during account creation.
The law, known as the App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420), was signed by Governor Greg Abbott in August and is set to take effect on January 1, 2026. Once the law is active, accounts belonging to users under the age of 18 will be required to affiliate with a Family Sharing group. This system mandates that parents or guardians provide explicit consent for every single app download, purchase, or in-app transaction made by the minor.
To help app developers meet these rigorous new demands, Apple is rolling out the Declared Age Range API, a framework that enables developers to obtain a user’s age category in a limited, privacy-preserving manner. Furthermore, Apple will introduce new APIs later this year that will empower developers to automatically request renewed parental consent should the app undergo any significant changes since the initial approval.
Privacy Concerns Versus Legislative Goal
Despite detailing its compliance plan, Apple has historically been opposed to stringent age-verification laws for its App Store. Earlier in May, CEO Tim Cook reportedly urged Governor Abbott to veto the legislation. In a statement on Wednesday, Apple reiterated its core concern: “We share the goal of strengthening kids’ online safety, [but] we are concerned that SB2420 impacts the privacy of users by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores.”
The Texas law is part of a growing trend in the U.S. where state legislatures are creating their own regulations to protect minors online, due to the failure of the federal government to establish comprehensive internet rules. Similar age-verification laws are scheduled to take effect in Utah on May 7, 2026, and in Louisiana on July 1, 2026. Apple stated that the compliance tools and “guardrails” it develops for Texas will also be extended to users in those two states.
Google’s Opposition and Industry Responsibility
Google has already announced the changes it plans to implement in the Google Play Store for Texas, Utah, and Louisiana next year. Like Apple, Google has also opposed the legislation, directing criticism at competitors it claims are pushing the burden of responsibility onto app stores. Kareem Ghanem, Google’s director of public policy, wrote in a blog post that “There are a variety of fast-moving legislative proposals being pushed by Meta and other companies in an effort to offload their own responsibilities to keep kids safe to app stores.” The issue of compliance is particularly difficult for smaller developers, who often lack the resources of a technology giant, as demonstrated by the social networking startup Bluesky, which was forced to block its service in Mississippi to avoid non-compliance fines.
What The Author Thinks
Apple’s public compliance combined with its privacy warning reveals the primary danger of fragmented state-level regulation: a legal framework that compels mass collection of sensitive data for trivial apps, thereby creating a massive, centralized honeypot of personal information for hackers. While the intent to protect children is laudable, forcing the same stringent age verification onto a weather app as a social media platform is disproportionate and increases systemic privacy risk for every user. This patchwork of state laws forces major platforms to divert resources into compliance rather than unified safety features, and it puts an unfair resource burden on small developers, risking a decline in the diversity of the App Store.
Featured image credit: Declan Sun via Unsplash
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