Texas student advocacy group sues to block app store age verification law

TEXAS (CN) — A Texas student group and two Texas students sued their state on Thursday to block an upcoming law that would require age verification to download any app from a phone’s app store.

The App Store Accountability Act, passed in the 2025 Texas legislative session as Senate Bill 2420, would require app stores to verify a phone user’s age before letting them download any apps onto their phone.

Starting in January 2026, the act would restrict users’ access to apps based on whether they are at least 13, 16, or 18 years old and would require all users to verify their ages. For users under 18, the law would also require a parent or guardian to link their account to the minor’s account and would require specific parental consent each time the minor wants to download any app or make an in-app purchase.

These restrictions would not just apply to social media apps, unlike a similar law the Supreme Court upheld by a 6-3 vote earlier this year. This law would restrict all apps, ranging from news outlets’ apps to music streaming apps to simple messaging apps, including the kinds of apps the Supreme Court classified as “fully protected.”

Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a student advocacy group that teaches students how to work in policymaking and policy education, filed its lawsuit in the Western District of Texas to block enforcement of the law, along with a student journalist and a student photographer. The group argues the law’s restriction exceeds those allowed by the First Amendment.

“Just as the government could not compel a bookstore to screen patrons and stop minors from purchasing any book without parental approval,” the student group notes in their lawsuit, “the state cannot ban minors from downloading digital content through app stores or within apps without parental consent.”

The primary argument of the student group’s suit is that the Texas law’s age verification requirement “creates significant and unjustifiable burdens on all Texans’ ability to share and receive information and expression” through the apps on their phones because it forces them to disclose sensitive identifying information like driver’s licenses to third-party apps.

For those without those kinds of identifying documents, this locks them out of using those apps entirely, thus depriving them of a key means of exercising their First Amendment free speech rights. And many of those who do have these documents — the lawsuit cites a figure of 66% of Americans from cases in other federal courts — do not trust third-party companies to securely handle the verification process, citing the risk of those documents being leaked.

Indeed, the popular social media company Discord suffered a leak of an estimated 70,000 users’ ID photos after it implemented age verification methods to comply with the UK’s Online Safety Act, a controversial law that imposes similar age verification requirements on apps and faces similar criticism from digital rights advocates.

Furthermore, this age verification requirement would block the student group’s ability to communicate or organize with students or parents who do not consent to handing over that sensitive information.

And while the Texas law would require companies to limit data collection for age verification purposes and would require them to securely transmit any data they do collect, the student groups argue the restriction still would not pass the “strict scrutiny” standard under the First Amendment.

“The act fails strict scrutiny because the state cannot show that any of the challenged provisions’ restrictions of speech are both necessary and the least-restrictive means to serve a compelling government interest,” the student group writes in the lawsuit. The group argues that the existing options of voluntary parental controls that most phones offer, and the aforementioned Texas law for age verification on certain platforms, are sufficient to enforce the state’s interest.

But it also argues the act presents an overly broad content-based restriction because “at every step, the act’s age-verification, parent-identification, and parental-consent mandates prioritize the government’s desired content regulation over parental choices: Parents are required to micromanage their children’s online access; forced to hand over sensitive legal documents and identification records to do so; and prevented from providing blanket consents even if they were willing to do so.”

Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, the law firm representing the students in their lawsuit, issued a statement alongside the suit.

“The First Amendment does not permit the government to require teenagers to get their parents’ permission before accessing information, except in discrete categories like obscenity,” Ambika Kumar, one of the law firm’s partners, said in the press release. “The Constitution also forbids restricting adults’ access to speech in the name of protecting children. This law imposes a system of prior restraint on protected expression that is presumptively unconstitutional.”

An industry group representing both app store operators like Google and Apple and big app developers like Audible also filed its own suit challenging the law on Thursday.

Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, introduced a similar bill in Congress in May 2025, but the bill stalled out in committee.