The four states, at a glance
| State | Law | Status | Compliance date | Enforcement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Texas | App Store Accountability Act (SB 2420) | Enforceable now | Statute effective Jan 1, 2026; enforcement resumed Jun 4, 2026 | Texas AG, under the Deceptive Trade Practices–Consumer Protection Act |
| Utah | App Store Accountability Act (as amended by HB 498) | Enacted, not yet operative | May 6, 2027 | Private right of action only — AG authority was removed |
| Louisiana | App Store Accountability Act (HB 570, reenacted by HB 977) | Enacted, not yet operative | Jul 1, 2027 | Louisiana AG — no private right of action |
| California | Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) | Enacted, not yet operative | Operative Jan 1, 2027; grace period to Jul 1, 2027 for certain accounts/apps | California AG / existing CA consumer-protection channels |
Texas: enforceable now (SB 2420)
Texas's App Store Accountability Act requires app marketplaces -- Apple's App Store, Google Play -- to verify a user's age at the account level, and for minors under 18, tie the account to a parent or guardian who gives verifiable consent before app downloads, in-app purchases, and "significant" app changes. App stores must share age/consent signals with developers, who use those signals to gate age-inappropriate content and honor consent withdrawal.
The statute text became effective January 1, 2026. A federal district court (W.D. Tex., CCIA v. Paxton) then issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement -- Apple's own developer-news post, dated December 23, 2025, confirms Apple paused its implementation plans in response. The 5th Circuit stayed that injunction on May 28, 2026, and a further ruling on June 1, 2026 kept the stay in place "for the duration of the appeal." Apple's developer-news post dated June 3, 2026 confirms the practical effect: age-assurance requirements resumed for new Apple Accounts in Texas starting June 4, 2026. The underlying constitutional challenge is still being litigated on the merits -- this law is enforceable right now, but it already reversed once, so don't build a compliance program on the assumption it can't happen again.
Enforcement runs through the Texas Attorney General, who can treat violations as deceptive trade practices under the DTPA. We deliberately don't cite a specific per-violation dollar figure here: several tech-news outlets reported numbers in the $10,000–$50,000 range, but neither figure checks out against the bill text or against law-firm client alerts (Wiley, Morrison Foerster) that describe the DTPA mechanism without citing a number. If you need the exact penalty exposure for a real decision, pull the current DTPA penalty schedule (Tex. Bus. & Com. Code) yourself rather than trusting a secondary source, including this one.
Utah: delayed to May 6, 2027, and enforcement changed shape (HB 498)
Utah's law is substantively similar to Texas's: age verification at the app-store level, parental consent for minors, consent-withdrawal mechanics. The original compliance date was May 6, 2026. HB 498 delayed that by one year, to May 6, 2027 -- and, notably, simultaneously removed the Utah Attorney General's enforcement authority. Following that amendment, the CCIA (Computer & Communications Industry Association) voluntarily dismissed its constitutional challenge on April 21, 2026, since there was no longer an AG enforcement action to challenge.
What remains is a private right of action: an injured minor, or their parent or guardian, can sue an app store or developer directly and recover the greater of actual damages or $1,000 per violation, plus litigation costs. That's a real, meaningful shift from regulator enforcement to individual-plaintiff enforcement -- no AG investigation sweep, but a working, statutory $1,000-per-violation floor available to any harmed individual plaintiff's attorney. Don't read "AG enforcement removed" as "this law got toothless."
Louisiana: reenacted with a new July 1, 2027 date (HB 977)
Louisiana's original App Store Accountability Act (HB 570) was signed June 30, 2025, with an original effective date of July 1, 2026. HB 977, signed May 15, 2026, repealed and reenacted the law with a one-year delay -- the new effective date is July 1, 2027 -- plus several substantive changes: developers may rely on the age/consent signals the app store provides unless they have actual knowledge their own internal data is more accurate; a new "family account" exception lets paid-subscription apps with an adult primary accountholder use that adult's age for safety defaults instead of separately verifying every subaccount; the requirement to verify age using both app-store signals and other sources was narrowed to focus primarily on app-store-provided signals; and the prior emergency-services-app carveout was removed.
Enforcement runs through the Louisiana Attorney General. Notably, Louisiana is the only one of these three enacted-and-litigated ASAA states without a private right of action -- enforcement runs through the AG only.
California: a different legal shape, operative January 1, 2027 (AB 1043)
California's Digital Age Assurance Act requires operating-system providers (Apple, Google) to build an age-signal-sharing mechanism; app developers who request and receive that signal must use it to provide age-appropriate experiences. This is a different legal shape from the ASAA family -- it's a data-privacy-style statute under California's AG/consumer-protection apparatus, rather than a deceptive-trade-practices statute layered onto app-store operation -- but the developer-facing mechanics (request an age signal, act on it) are functionally similar.
AB 1043 was signed/chaptered October 13, 2025 and is operative January 1, 2027, with a grace period to July 1, 2027 specifically for devices/accounts where setup was completed before January 1, 2027, and apps last updated on or after January 1, 2026 whose developers must request age signals for users whose devices received the app before the operative date.
Which states actually apply to you
If your app has any users in Texas, Utah, Louisiana, or California -- and realistically, if you distribute nationally, it does -- you have a compliance question to answer for each state, on a different clock. Texas is the only one where the clock has already started; the other three give you real runway, but "2027 feels far away" is exactly the assumption that leaves a team building the integration work in a rush the month before a deadline instead of on their own schedule.
A concrete reason not to trust a date just because it's on Apple's own site
Apple's own developer-news post covering Utah and Louisiana is dated February 25, 2026 and states Utah's date as May 6, 2026 and Louisiana's as July 1, 2026 -- both pre-amendment, both now wrong per the corrected dates above. As of this writing, months after both states delayed by a year, Apple's page still hasn't been updated to reflect either change. Apple's documentation is authoritative for what its APIs do and how to call them; it is not authoritative for when a given state's law takes effect. That's the state's own text, or a current law-firm tracker -- never a developer-news post's publish date alone.
What to do first, regardless of which states apply to you
- Confirm where your users actually are. If you have meaningful usage in any of the four states above, that state's law is a live question for your app, not a hypothetical one.
- Sort your states by deadline, not by alphabet. Texas is enforceable today. California is next (January 1, 2027 operative, grace to July 1, 2027). Utah and Louisiana both land in mid-2027. Prioritize your build accordingly.
- Figure out which platform APIs you actually need to call. Apple and Google each ship their own age-signal mechanism, and they are not the same shape -- see our companion guide on the Apple Declared Age Range API vs. Google Play Age Signals for what each one actually requires you to build.
- Re-verify every date above before you finalize a build timeline. See the method below -- it takes a few minutes and it's the single highest-leverage step in this whole list, given that two of these four dates already moved once.
How to re-verify these dates yourself
Do this before you rely on any date in this article for a real compliance decision, and repeat it roughly every 60–90 days while any of these dates are still in the future:
- Search
"[state] App Store Accountability Act" amendment 2026or2027-- both amendments referenced above (Utah's HB 498, Louisiana's HB 977) were delays passed after the laws were originally enacted. That pattern may repeat. - Check the state legislature's own bill-tracking page for the amending bill number, not just a law firm's summary of it. Law-firm alerts are excellent for finding what changed, but the bill page is the actual primary source for the current, controlling date.
- Cross-check Apple's and Google's own developer-news pages against the state deadline you just found -- don't assume they match, per the documentation-lag example above.
- Note the publish date of anything you read, including this article. A compliance date sourced from an undated blog post is not verified -- it's a guess with a citation attached.
Sources checked directly for this article: Apple developer-news posts dated Nov 4, 2025, Dec 23, 2025, Feb 25, 2026, and Jun 3, 2026; Wiley's "Key Developments With State App Store Accountability Acts, as Texas Act Takes Effect"; Morrison Foerster's "Update: Texas App Store Law Takes Effect After Fifth Circuit Stays Preliminary Injunction"; Wiley/JDSupra's "Utah Amends App Store Accountability Act (ASAA) – Key Obligations Delayed Until May 6, 2027"; Alston & Bird's "Challenge to Utah's App Store Accountability Act Voluntarily Dismissed Following Statutory Amendments" and "Louisiana Delays App Store Accountability Effective Date to July 2027"; Bass, Berry & Sims's "Apps and Minors: New Compliance Frontiers and Risks in Louisiana, Utah, and Texas"; and the California Legislature's own bill page for AB 1043 (leginfo.legislature.ca.gov, bill 202520260AB1043).