I spend well over a month now on the topic to implement the different half cooked APIs into our apps. The chance that this gets overturned or blocked was high but we had to race anyways. I’m curious what this means for similar legislations in others states line Utah and Louisiana that where planned to get into effect later this year.

I very much saw the irony that Texas of all regions tried to restrict the Wild West that is the digital App Store landscape. I think something needs to be done but the implementation proposed is not just problematic but also downright technically impossible. Our first implementation simply failed open for all kinds of errors. Reading the AppStore Age Verification APIs (except Apple) they tried to make this an app problem ala: Playstore is not up to date. Show a message to the user yadayadayada… There so many reasons why this call can go wrong. And the apps won’t start blocking all users just because this call failed. Not to speak about the issue that just for Texas we had to implement said call globally. Because the law states that a an account created after 1.1.26 of a Texas “resident” needs these additional checks. Well let’s see what happens next.