Justice Samuel Alito refused to block Texas from enforcing its App Store Accountability Act, handing parents a win and Big Tech's trade lobby a defeat as the law takes full effect statewide.
The fight is over. For now, anyway. Justice Samuel Alito, who handles emergency appeals out of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, issued a pair of one-sentence orders on Monday denying requests to pause Texas Senate Bill 2420, the App Store Accountability Act. That means Apple's App Store and Google Play must keep verifying the ages of Texas users and securing parental consent before minors can download apps or spend money on in-app purchases.
Gov. Greg Abbott signed SB 2420 into law on May 27, 2025. It requires app stores to sort users into age categories and get affirmative parental sign-off for every download, every app purchase, and every in-app purchase a minor tries to make. No bundled, one-time consent forms. Parents can also revoke that consent, and app stores have to notify developers when they do.
Two plaintiffs asked the Supreme Court to intervene: the Computer & Communications Industry Association, a trade group whose members include Apple and Google, and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a group that had recruited two teenagers as plaintiffs. Both argued the law violates the First Amendment by forcing sweeping identity checks just to open an app. Stephanie Joyce, CCIA's senior vice president and director of litigation, called it an unconstitutional burden on speech and warned it would chill access to lawful apps for adults and minors alike.
Alito's orders came without an opinion, which is standard practice for emergency applications routed through a single justice acting as circuit justice for the 5th Circuit. He did not refer either request to the full court, and neither order carried a noted dissent. That procedural quiet leaves the underlying constitutional questions untouched. The denial only means the law stays in effect while litigation over its merits continues in the lower courts, not that the Supreme Court has ruled on whether SB 2420 passes First Amendment scrutiny.
The law had already survived a similar test at the 5th Circuit itself. A three-judge panel declined to issue an injunction pending appeal earlier this year, finding the challengers had not shown a strong likelihood of success on the merits. That ruling is what CCIA and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas were trying to get the Supreme Court to override on an emergency basis. With Alito's refusal, the case now returns to the normal appellate track, where the 5th Circuit will eventually hear full briefing and oral argument on whether the law can stand long term.
Texas is not acting alone. Utah, Louisiana and a handful of other states have passed or introduced their own versions of app store age verification requirements over the past two years, part of a broader legislative push responding to parent groups and child safety advocates who say platforms have moved too slowly to protect minors from predatory in-app purchases, unsupervised downloads and exposure to adult content through unrated or mis-rated apps. Utah's law, one of the earliest, faced its own legal challenge from NetChoice, another tech trade association, though that case has followed a slower track through federal district court rather than reaching the Supreme Court on an emergency footing.
Apple and Google have both said publicly they support the goal of protecting kids online but have pushed back on state-by-state age verification mandates specifically, arguing the requirement to collect and verify identity data for every user, including adults, creates its own privacy risks. Apple has floated an alternative it calls a "declared age range" system, where parents set an age band for a child's device that app developers can then check against, without app stores or developers needing to collect government identification. Texas lawmakers rejected that framework when drafting SB 2420, insisting on affirmative, verifiable parental consent rather than a self-reported age signal.
Child safety advocates, including groups that lobbied for the bill's passage in Austin, framed Monday's outcome as validation that states can regulate app stores directly rather than waiting on Congress, which has debated but never passed a federal kids online safety law despite years of hearings involving executives from Meta, TikTok, Snap and other platforms. For those advocates, Texas becomes the proof of concept: a large state with genuine market leverage over Apple and Google forcing compliance without federal action.
For now, Texas developers and the two companies that run the dominant mobile app marketplaces have to keep operating under the law while the broader appeal plays out. Expect the CCIA and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas to press ahead at the 5th Circuit rather than drop the case, and expect other states watching Texas to move faster on similar bills now that an emergency Supreme Court challenge has failed to stop enforcement. Whether the law ultimately survives a full constitutional review is still an open question. Whether other states follow Texas's lead in the meantime looks increasingly like a formality.
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