Texas’ app-store law is giving parents more control of kids’ phones | Opinion
I recently had to explain Apple Pay to my parents. They love it now, but getting there required patience, repetition and a fair amount of starting over. We ended the way those sessions usually end, with them saying: “That’s so easy, I had no idea it was so simple.”
The thing is, it was not simple. It just became familiar. And there is a real difference between the two, especially for parents trying to track what their children are doing on their phones. Familiarity takes time — something that platform updates and new app releases never wait for.
That is the gap the Texas Legislature aimed to close with a new law that took effect this year. The App Store Accountability Act requires merchants to verify users’ ages when they create accounts. Adults get full access. Minors have their accounts linked to a parent or guardian, who approves downloads and in-app purchases on an ongoing basis. App content ratings must accurately reflect the content, and any data collected during verification must be promptly deleted.
The framework is built around one premise: Parents should know what their kids are downloading before they download it.
This is not a new idea applied in a new context. It is an old idea finally applied to a place it has never reached. A convenience store clerk is legally required to check ID before selling age-restricted products. The store is doing the verification. Not the brand, not the customer. The new law, known as SB 2420, extends that same logic to the App Store, the only major marketplace in American life that has never had to ask who was at the door.
Opponents have raised First Amendment objections, and the argument deserves a serious answer rather than a dismissal. A student advocacy group called Students Engaged in Advancing Texas contends that requiring parental consent burdens minors’ access to protected speech, including apps used for civic participation and journalism. A federal district court initially agreed, blocking the law on the grounds that it restricted access to a broad range of constitutionally protected content.
Critics compared the law to requiring a bookstore to check ID before letting anyone browse.
The comparison sounds alarming until you examine what the law actually prohibits, which is nothing. No app is banned. No content is removed. A teenager can still access any app his or her parent approves, and parents retain full discretion over what that means in their household.
The First Amendment argument assumes that parental involvement is itself a form of censorship. That may be a coherent position for a tech industry trade association to take. It is a harder position to defend at a kitchen table.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found the district court’s analysis unpersuasive. The appeals court ruled that the law more plausibly regulates a commercial transaction rather than restricts speech and that the constitutional standard should reflect that. Under that reading, Texas has a reasonable basis for what it did.
The case is now before the Supreme Court, but the 5th Circuit’s logic is the right one: App stores are marketplaces. Knowing who your customers are before completing a sale is not a threat to the Bill of Rights.
What often gets lost in the legal debate is how modest the actual ask is. SB 2420 does not tell parents what to permit or prohibit. It does not require government access to personal data; the law demands deletion of verification data after the fact. It does not pick winners among apps or platforms. It creates an account structure that mirrors what most families already try to do manually, badly, without any cooperation from the companies profiting from their children’s attention.
Fully 80% of Texas parents support the requirement. The bill passed with near-unanimous legislative support — 93 percent of the Texas House voted yes, with only one state senator opposed. Bipartisan agreement at that scale, on any issue, is worth paying attention to.
My parents figured out Apple Pay. It took a Saturday afternoon and some trial and error, but we got there. Parents across Texas are more than capable of managing their children’s app permissions. They just need app stores to stop pretending the conversation was never theirs to have.
Hannah Bruck is a policy scholar at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where she specializes in family policy research and quantitative assessments of legislative efficiency in the Texas Legislature.
