The Supreme Court, in an unsigned order, let Texas enforce its 2025 App Store Accountability Act that bars most minors under 18 from downloading apps without parental consent while lawsuits proceed in lower courts.
By the time the Supreme Court acted on Monday. Texas had already moved the fight into the real world of phones and passwords. A law passed in 2025—designed to keep minors from downloading most apps without a parent’s permission—can go into effect even as challengers take their case through the lower courts.
The high court’s decision came in an unsigned, unexplained order. It allowed Texas to enforce the App Store Accountability Act while multiple organizations continue to argue that the restriction violates children’s freedom of speech.
Texas’s law requires app stores to verify users’ ages. Children under age 18 are barred from downloading most apps without parental consent. In practice. that means young users would need approval before installing popular categories of apps—such as Instagram. library apps. and the apps of news organizations—under the state’s new framework.
Texas’s defense is explicit about its purpose. In filings to a lower court, the state said legislators enacted the law to keep minors from seeing “harmful” material.
The challengers countered that the scope of the measure makes it unconstitutional under Supreme Court precedents that recognize children’s free-speech rights. They argued that a broad restriction like this cannot simply be justified as a matter of age control.
Texas pushed back by characterizing the regulation as targeting less-protected ground. In its submissions, the state argued the law regulates only “commercial speech,” and therefore should receive less constitutional protection.
The law’s exceptions are narrow. It includes only a few carve-outs—for apps made by emergency services and for the companies that oversee college entrance exams—leaving most other app categories subject to the parental-consent requirement.
That enforcement fight has already moved through the federal courts. A lower court initially blocked the law from taking effect, writing that it “prohibits minors from participating in the democratic exchange of views online.”
In June, a panel of judges on the conservative Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed course and reinstated the law.
On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to stop it, leaving the app-restriction regime in place at least for now. With the high court’s action, the case returns to the lower courts for further litigation.
Utah, Louisiana, and Alabama have passed similar laws, setting up a broader pattern of state action—one that turns on how far courts will allow governments to regulate minors’ access to online spaces.
This is not the first time the Supreme Court has been asked to weigh children’s online access. Last year, the court upheld a Texas law requiring pornographic websites to verify users’ ages. But the court has treated children’s access to pornography differently than other access questions.
The ruling on Monday does not decide the merits of the constitutional dispute. It means only that the law can be enforced while the lawsuits continue. Still. the Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene at this stage is being read as a tentative signal that at least some of the policy’s supporters are likely to find more room in court than they expected—even as the fight over children’s speech rights is far from over.
Supreme Court Texas App Store Accountability Act minors parental consent app downloads freedom of speech Fifth Circuit online access children’s rights