Apple loses EU court battle over App Store gatekeeping

The General Court of the European Union has rejected Apple's legal challenge to its designation as a "gatekeeper" under the Digital Markets Act, confirming the European Commission's authority to regulate Apple's app store ecosystem across all major platforms Engadget. The ruling, issued this month, came from the General Court, a constituent body of the Court of Justice of the European Union, and was formalized in press release No 96/26 CJEU.

The decision addresses the structure of how Apple distributes software. Judges upheld the Commission's finding that Apple's five app stores — covering iOS, macOS, watchOS, iPadOS, and tvOS — should be treated as one core platform service for regulatory purposes, rather than five separate products. That consolidation matters in practical terms: it eliminates any argument that smaller platforms like tvOS or watchOS might fall below the DMA's regulatory thresholds on their own.

The ruling requires Apple to allow competing services to work with all five app stores, and prohibits Apple from favoring its own services over rivals within those stores. The General Court also rejected Apple's separate legal challenges to the DMA itself and to the Commission's investigation of Apple's messaging service, iMessage CJEU.

Apple has stated it disagrees with the outcome. A company spokesperson said: "We firmly believe the DMA's mandate goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate, threatening to erode decades of privacy and security protections we've built and leaving our users vulnerable to new risks" Engadget. The company has not yet said whether it will appeal to the Court of Justice, the higher tier of EU courts.

Apple is fighting on multiple fronts. The company still has two pending cases: one challenging the Commission's order requiring iOS to support third-party developers, and another appealing a €500 million fine for anti-steering rules — restrictions that prevented app developers from directing users to cheaper payment options outside the App Store Engadget.

This dispute has been building. In September 2025, Apple published a statement arguing that the DMA "is not living up to" its stated goal of expanding competition and consumer choice in the EU Apple Newsroom. That argument positioned the regulation as a failed policy, rather than an illegal overreach — a different strategy from the legal challenge Apple just lost in court, which focused on whether Brussels had the authority to designate and enforce its rules as written.

These are two separate battles. Losing the gatekeeper challenge does not resolve Apple's argument about whether the DMA works as intended; it only settles the legal question of whether the Commission had the right to regulate Apple this way. Apple is pursuing both fights simultaneously — one in the courts, one in the court of public opinion.

Apple's main complaint — restated in the company's response — is that the requirement to open up interoperability weakens the security model built around its app review process and sandboxing (a technique that isolates apps from each other and from the system). This touches a genuine engineering challenge: opening APIs and app store access to third parties does expand the surface area where attacks could occur, and Apple's point has technical validity. Whether the DMA's obligations create disproportionate security trade-offs for the competitive benefit gained is the kind of judgment courts struggle to make with certainty, and it is worth noting that neither the court's decision nor Apple's public statements have settled that question with data.

What the ruling does settle is legal authority. The General Court's decision to treat all five app stores as one unified platform closes off a structural argument Apple might have used — claiming that lower-traffic platforms like tvOS or watchOS should face narrower obligations. The decision also affirms the Commission's broader interpretation of the DMA: that gatekeeper status belongs to an ecosystem as a whole, not to individual products within it. That principle could shape how the same law is applied to other bundled platform businesses down the line.

The two remaining cases — the iOS third-party developer order and the €500 million fine for anti-steering — will likely matter more for how the App Store actually operates, since they touch payment systems and distribution directly rather than the abstract concept of gatekeeper designation. Those rulings are still pending. Apple's next steps, including whether it appeals this decision to the full Court of Justice, will determine how fiercely it contests the remaining battles.