First off, this is just another step, and if you believe it's the last one then I have a nice bridge to sell you

Slippery slope fallacy. This law is basically just asking for a more unified and organized version of how we already check for age verification (which is every individual app or website asking for your birthday). If there was anything more than that I’d agree with you. I do agree that it’s annoying this is coming in the form of a law instead of an addition from Apple that they use in marketing that gets others to follow suit. I think that would have been a healthier way for this sort of organization to happen.

That being said, I do agree with you that the potential “next step” of asking the OS to verify your age would be an issue.

Do you believe that the app developed by some random kid in a random country will start checking age just because newsom wants it?

They already have to select what age range the app is for when they submit it to Apple or Google, and it’s Apple or Google that will have to make changes to comply with this law. If they aren’t distributing through an “app store” there is nothing the 3rd party developer needs to do or worry about according tot his law. However, I am curious how this will end up being applied to command line tools and package managers.

And IF this system allows you to put in whatever date, then what's the point, beyond some security theater?

I agree, except it could be a form of parental controls. One thing I really don’t like about this law is I think the parents should decide what content is appropriate for their child, rather than the App Store. But not having any validation both puts the control back in the parents hands to some extent, while also making sure the law stops short of becoming a serious privacy and security issue.

This bill is absolute horse shit and won't go anywhere because this is not how the world works. This will likely end with citizens in California having a really really tiny amount of software available to them legally

Considering most of the biggest software companies in the world have offices in or are based out California, that’s simply not true. Apple, Google, and Microsoft will all comply, regardless of how reasonable the rules are. At best they would fight it in court.

I doubt anyone is planning to sue open source OS developers over this, but honestly the changes it asks for are pretty small, so I expect most linux distros will follow suit anyway.

Ofc I don’t think there is anything California could do to enforce this on FOSS software in any practical way, if it came to that.