Apps, Speech, and Commerce

In Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, the Fifth Circuit stayed a district court’s preliminary injunction against the Texas App Store Accountability Act, holding that the State made a strong showing that the law regulates, at most, commercial speech subject to intermediate scrutiny rather than the strict scrutiny the district court applied.

The Court found that app store listings “propose commercial transactions” because users browse a catalog of apps and download or buy them, and even apps that are “free” extract value through “access to user data and private information”. Because this is commercial speech, the State need only show a “reasonable fit” between the law and its goals, not the least restrictive means. The Court also noted the law “may not regulate speech at all, given that it does not target any substantive content but instead regulates commercial conduct with an incidental relationship to speech” No. 25-51073, Jun. 4, 2026.