AgeBridge guide
The Texas App Store Accountability Act, explained for developers
What SB 2420 requires from app stores and what signals developers receive — age categories, parental consent, and significant-change re-consent, effective January 1, 2026.
What the law does
Texas SB 2420 (2025) puts age assurance at the app-store layer: stores must verify a user's age category, minors' accounts must be linked to a parent, and parental consent is required for app downloads and purchases. Developers don't run the verification — they receive age-category and consent signals from the store and must honor them.
The significant-change trap
Consent is not one-and-done. When an app changes significantly — new data practices, new feature surface relevant to minors — renewed parental consent is required before the changed functionality applies to minor users. That makes 'what did this release change?' a compliance question, and it's the piece most teams have no workflow for.
What to build
Consume the store-provided signals, normalize them (age range, consent state), gate features on the normalized state rather than platform-specific responses, and run a pre-launch review for every significant feature change. Keep decisions auditable — if a regulator or platform asks why a minor saw a feature, you want the rule version and signals on record.
Authoritative sources
This guide is general information, not legal advice. Requirements change; the linked sources are authoritative.