Categories: Technology

Apple announces new requirements for apps available in Texas

A new Texas state law will soon require apps to enforce some form of “age guarantee” with users, and in response, Apple has announced upcoming changes to apps available in Texas.

Texas SB2420 imposes new enforcement requirements on Apple

Today on the Apple Developer site, the company shared the following in a new post:

Effective January 1, 2026, a new Texas state law, SB2420, introduces age-guarantee requirements for app marketplaces and developers. While we share the goal of strengthening children’s online safety, we are concerned that SB2420 could impact user privacy by requiring the collection of sensitive, personally identifiable information to download any app, even if a user simply wants to check the weather or sports scores.

After the law comes into effect, Apple says any user creating a new Apple account will need to confirm whether they are 18 or older.

If this new user is a minor, they will need to join a Family Sharing group so that parents or guardians can provide consent for all purchases, download activities, etc.

In other words: new Apple accounts for minors will have to be explicitly supervised by adults through Apple’s existing Family Sharing system.

Apple says this also impacts developers. Developers “will need to adopt new features and change behavior within their applications to meet their legal obligations.”

To help developers meet their obligations while maintaining privacy, we will introduce features to help them obtain user age ratings and manage significant changes, as required by Texas state law. The Declared Age Range API is available now and will be updated in the coming months to provide the required age categories for new account users in Texas. And new APIs launching later this year will allow developers, when they determine that a significant change is being made to their app, to invoke a system experience to allow the user to request that parental consent be obtained again.

SB2420 is a Texas-specific bill, so these changes will only be applied to Texas-based users.

However, Apple says similar requirements will take effect later in 2026 for users based in Utah and Louisiana, based on the laws of those respective states.

It’s no coincidence that earlier this year, Apple announced a handful of new family tools for child accounts arriving in iOS 26. One of them is the Declared Age Range API referenced above, which allows users to share an age range with apps in a way that protects privacy and avoids having to enter the actual date of birth.

You can read all the details of these iOS 26 changes here.