His comment:
I don’t understand why developers have to change the apps for new age verification, that should be up to the store when selling the product to do on purchase, why are they even getting their % of money anyway?
The attached image, the email he got:
https://media.thebrainbin.org/3f/f8/3ff8b193449ba67ac4e41546a1c8b106e224f6b71bc851a7f6dcf27b04973478.png
Besides what I commented in his post, some more things come to mind that I think add to it:
The US is a federation, meaning one province’s laws shouldn’t directly affect the others. But the email he received says that he has “at least one app (…) available to (…) users in the U.S.”, and right next explaining it’s due to Texas’ App Store Accountability Act. This implies the laws of one province are affecting how the program is provided for the whole union, or at least that Google is making it so. Granularity is nowhere to be found it seems.
Also in the part that I quoted, the second omitted element is “or used by (users in the U.S.)”. People can get access to stuff not officially available in their countries legitimately, apparently those being considered imports in such cases (please correct me if I’m wrong). And extrapolating, such programs could even “be used” by pirates and people circumventing geoblocking. So in all cases, would the developer be tied to the laws of a country by how an user uses it? Feels like a trap.
“I don’t live in your pissant state, this is not my problem.”
At no point in that email does Google say you have to add age verification. They are saying you might need to age-gate certain things if you want to comply with the law and they are rolling out a feature that allows you to age-gate things without having to do the verification yourself.
That is 100% true u.s states laws are essentially federated. However, Google and Meta are big ‘monopolistic’ the companies who want to be able to profit and age verification opens that up for them and so expect them to use terms like ‘global regulations’ or any excuses to further push for verification.
