Last week, the Texas legislature passed a bill that would require Apple, Google, and others to conduct age verification on their users, shifting the burden to app stores and app developers. The bill now heads to the governor’s desk for signature, adding to the national patchwork of laws on app store age verification, like in Utah.

While everyone agrees we need to do more to protect children’s privacy and safety online, these age assurance bills could place an enormous economic and regulatory burden on apps, particularly on small businesses that developed and own the vast majority of apps today. Those designing these bills may fail to recognize that the burden of age verification is being shifted to the owners of the 4 million apps offered in the US – 90%  of which were developed by small businesses – who now will have to update their apps to comply with the law. This is despite the fact that only a tiny fraction of apps host age-inappropriate content. For small businesses like restaurants, bike shops, and bed and breakfast establishments that have an app, but don’t host age inappropriate content, the Texas law and others like it create a huge burden with no economic or child safety benefits. This enormous economic burden is created to give parents tools they already have: the ability to approve apps before they are downloaded, a capability that both Google and Apple already have built-in to their app stores. 

Trusted Future ran the numbers to see how much this regulation could cost small businesses. Our estimates suggest that it could conservatively cost $20K per small business to comply. When multiplied across 3.5 million small business apps, the law creates a total burden of $70 billion – more than double what the U.S. Chamber estimates the total federal regulatory burden on small businesses in the United States. 

With today’s uncertain economic climate, when small businesses are already disproportionately impacted by growing tariffs, now is not the time to add unnecessary costs on small businesses, particularly those that do not pose a danger to our kids online. More effective age verification tools should be housed within the apps that young people access, where they can be targeted, sensitive to privacy, and with limited impacts on the rest of the app economy.

Here’s the math.    

How many apps are there?

• As of May 13, 2025, the Apple App Store offers approximately 1.93 million apps, while Google Play features roughly 2.03 million, roughly 4 million apps total. Some companies have apps on both platforms, but both the iOS version and the Android version would have to be updated separately to accept the required age API information under the Texas bill.
• The Texas bill applies to every app in every app store, and requires every developer to redevelop their app. It doesn’t distinguish between Texas-based apps, doesn’t carve out small businesses, and applies to apps even when they don’t have age-inappropriate content – and where parents and children would get no benefit despite the costs imposed on app owners. 

How many of these apps are small business owned?

• In 2022, more than 90% of the apps on the Apple App Store were developed by small businesses, for about 1.7 million apps. Assuming Google has a similar rate of small businesses, or about 1.8 million apps, small businesses have an estimated 3.5 million apps to update.  

How much will it cost businesses to update their apps? 

• To comply with the law, each app owner will have to update their technology and ensure they are in compliance. For most of these businesses, they’ll have to hire experts to help comply, and the costs can add up quickly.
  • Estimates range from $5,000 to $30,000 to hire a mobile developer expert to update an app.
  • Businesses will also have to hire legal experts to ensure the updated app meets the law’s requirements; some estimate the cost to a small business of doing a privacy audit at $10,000.
  • Besides these initial costs of updating an app, app owners will have to factor in ongoing maintenance costs and updates to ensure compatibility, potentially incurring more fees.
• Taken together (updating the app and assuring compliance), it could reasonably cost a small business $10,000 for the update and $10,000 for compliance for around $20,000 per small business.  
• But if everyone needs to update apps at once, there could be a shortage of both app developers and compliance professionals – leading to higher costs for everyone. Using higher estimates, it could cost as much as $30,000 to update an app plus $50,000 for compliance, or $80,000 total per small business. 

What would the impact overall be?

• At a time when policymakers are trying to cut red tape for small businesses, what impact could this have? Signs point to a potentially enormous regulatory burden for small business. Many small businesses like a restaurant or bike shop don’t have a developer or digital compliance officer on staff, and will have to pay the costs outlined above.
• If small businesses have an estimated 3.5 million apps to update, and it conservatively costs $20,000 each to update and assure compliance, then it could cost small businesses $70 billion to comply.  
• However, it could cost substantially more. If actual costs to small businesses are on the higher side, up to $80,000 each, then it could cost small businesses upwards of $280 billion.  
• These estimates only include the initial costs for software updates and compliance, and do not reflect the recurring costs which will drive costs to small businesses even higher. 
• Given the high cost to comply, there are likely to be some small businesses who choose to remove their apps from app stores and to no longer participate in the app economy as a result. This would be an especially unfortunate result for a small business app that has no age-inappropriate content, but has relied upon e-commerce for part of its revenue stream.   
• In addition, even though the legislation creates new obligations and legal liability for every app that appears in app stores in Texas (which includes out of state apps) we presume that there will be an insignificant number of small businesses who may be unaware of these new obligations, and unable to meet the very short compliance window established in the legislation.

To put this in context:

• According to the US Chamber of Commerce, the regulatory costs of federal economically significant rules to small businesses amount to over $40 billion per year.
• All this adds up to what could be substantially higher costs to small businesses than their existing federal regulatory burden.