The Supreme Court has allowed Texas to start enforcing a law that puts age checks and parental-consent duties on app stores, leaving Apple, Google, app developers, parents, and minors under a new state regime while the constitutional fight continues.
In two brief orders issued Monday, the justices denied emergency requests from the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. Both groups had asked the Court to revive a lower-court order that blocked the Texas App Store Accountability Act before it took effect.
The Court did not explain its reasoning. Each order said only that the application referred by Justice Samuel Alito was denied. That means a December 2025 preliminary injunction from US District Judge Robert Pitman remains stayed, and Texas may enforce the law unless another court says otherwise.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals has set oral argument for August 4. The Supreme Court could still take up the dispute after the appeals court finishes with it.
What the Texas law requires
The Texas App Store Accountability Act requires app stores to verify users’ ages through a “commercially reasonable method of verification” and place limits on accounts belonging to people under 18. Apple and Google said last year that they would comply, while warning that the law would damage user privacy.
The fight is really over who has to inspect the gate before a person downloads software: the app store, the parent, the state, or nobody. Texas says it is regulating commercial access to apps as products. The challengers say the state is using app distribution as a choke point for speech across the mobile internet.
CCIA, a trade group whose members include large technology companies, has described the law as a sweeping censorship system for mobile apps. After the Supreme Court’s order, CCIA CEO Matt Schruers said the group would argue in August that the law violates the First Amendment. He said people should not have to surrender personal data to get online, comparing the requirement to showing government ID before entering a bookstore.
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas told the Supreme Court that the law reaches protected material including news and educational resources. The group argued that the act treats broad categories of internet access as commercial speech and interferes with parents’ choices about how to supervise their children.
Courts split over the First Amendment test
Pitman blocked the law in December, finding that the challengers were likely to show a First Amendment violation. He applied strict scrutiny, the demanding test courts use for laws that regulate speech based on content. Pitman pointed to exemptions for some nonprofit, government, and emergency-service apps, and said the law aimed to shield minors from speech Texas considered harmful or objectionable.
The 5th Circuit disagreed on June 4 and stayed Pitman’s injunction. A three-judge panel said Texas had made a strong showing that Pitman committed reversible errors. The panel said the district court likely should not have applied strict scrutiny to large parts of the law, if any of it.
The appeals court characterized app listings as speech proposing commercial transactions, even where no money changes hands. On that view, the law is subject to intermediate scrutiny, a lower bar. The panel said the act likely advances Texas’ interests in children’s privacy, safety, and data protection without burdening substantially more speech than necessary.
The 5th Circuit also criticized Pitman’s injunction because it blocked enforcement against everyone, rather than only against the plaintiffs and their members.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said after the 5th Circuit ruling that Texas has both the right and the duty to protect children online, and that parents should know what their children download and be able to stop access to harmful or inappropriate material.
Texas told the Supreme Court its law resembles age limits on driver’s licenses: the state can regulate children’s access to a product category even if some children want to use that product to engage in expression. The challengers counter that Texas already has a narrower age-verification law for porn sites, which the Supreme Court upheld in June 2025, and that the app store law reaches much farther into non-obscene speech.
This story draws on original reporting from Ars Technica.
