EU court backs digital markets law against Apple App Store challenge

The General Court in Luxembourg rejected Apple’s challenge to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act on July 8, confirming that the App Store and iOS can be treated as gatekeeper services under the bloc’s competition law. The ruling also left intact Apple’s gatekeeper designation over iPadOS and dismissed the company’s challenge over iMessage as inadmissible.

The decision matters well beyond one company because the DMA is enforced by the European Commission and can carry penalties of as much as 10% of a firm’s worldwide annual turnover. Apple was first designated a gatekeeper for iOS, the App Store and Safari on September 5, 2023, and for iPadOS on April 29, 2024, as part of the Commission’s initial move naming six gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft.

Apple argued the law overreaches and threatens the privacy and security built into its ecosystem. In a statement, the company said it believes the DMA goes beyond what is lawful and proportionate and could “erode decades of privacy and security protections” for European users. The court sided with the Commission, reinforcing the regulator’s authority to push dominant platforms toward more interoperability, more competition and more user choice.

The ruling also lands after an earlier enforcement step. On April 23, 2025, the Commission fined Apple €500 million for breaching the DMA’s anti-steering obligation in relation to the App Store. That penalty signaled how the law can translate into direct financial exposure for platform behavior that Brussels sees as limiting competition.

For Apple, the pressure now extends to practices at the center of its European business: App Store rules, the control it exercises over iOS, and the company’s messaging and ecosystem integration strategy. In June 2026, Apple warned that, because of the DMA, it would not be able to ship its new Siri AI in the European Union with iOS 27 and iPadOS 27, a sign that the law is already affecting product launches and feature availability.

Apple can still appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union, but any further challenge would be limited to points of law and would have to be filed within two months and ten days of notification of the judgment. The General Court’s ruling leaves the DMA in place as a live enforcement regime for app stores, operating systems and the wider mobile market.