Brussels has just won round one against the world’s most valuable company. The General Court in Luxembourg has dismissed Apple’s challenge to its “gatekeeper” label under EU’s tech regulation. Apple’s App Store and iOS remain firmly bound by the rules.
Judges agreed with the European Commission on the central question. Apple runs five separate app stores, one each for the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. The Court said all five exist for the same reason: connecting developers with users. That single purpose is enough, in the eyes of EU law, to treat them as one “core platform service”.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. It is exactly what triggered Apple’s gatekeeper obligations back in September 2023. The Commission argued that Apple’s sheer size and reach let it decide who gets access to hundreds of millions of European users. Apple pushed back against nearly every part of that logic, and lost on almost all counts.
One store, one set of rules
Apple tried a second angle of attack. It argued the Digital Markets Act’s (DMA) interoperability rules, which force the company to connect and work with smaller third-party apps upon request, should never have applied to it in the first place, calling the underlying provision unlawful. The Court threw that argument out on a technicality. It found the provision was not actually the legal basis for Apple’s designation, so its legality could not be challenged this way.
Judges also rejected Apple’s complaint over iMessage, which the Commission had classified as a “number independent interpersonal communications service”, a category that can drag a service into telecoms style obligations under the DMA. The Court said the label alone changes nothing in practice, since iMessage was never formally listed as an important gateway. No obligations apply to it as things stand, so judges dismissed the complaint as inadmissible, along with related challenges to the Commission’s investigation.
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Apple can still appeal, but only on points of law, and only to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc’s highest court. It has two months and 10 days from notification to decide.
Apple vows to keep fighting
Apple made clear it isn’t backing down. “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,” a company spokesperson said. “We will continue advocating for the innovation and privacy our European customers deserve.”
We firmly believe the DMA’s mandate goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate.
— Apple spokesperson
Few companies have fought the DMA as hard as Apple, which has filed five separate legal challenges against the Commission since the law took effect. The scoreboard so far mostly favours Brussels. Judges threw out ByteDance’s challenge in full back in 2024 and only partly annulled Meta’s gatekeeper status last month.
The relationship between Apple and Brussels keeps getting rockier. The two sides clashed publicly just last month, after Apple said EU rules were the reason it couldn’t launch an upgraded Siri assistant across the bloc. Weeks later, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook held a video call with the EU’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, which the Commission described as “constructive.”
Two more disputes are still pending: one over Commission demands that Apple open iOS to third party developers, another over a €500m fine handed down in April 2025 for anti steering violations.
