Apple’s gatekeeper era is permanent now: EU court tosses the DMA challenge

Apple is a gatekeeper, and the designation now carries the European judiciary’s signature. The General Court in Luxembourg on July 8 dismissed all three of Apple’s actions challenging its status under the Digital Markets Act, upholding the 2023 designation of iOS and the App Store and throwing out the company’s iMessage complaints as inadmissible.

No fine. No new remedy. The precision matters, because what the court upheld is the switch that turns everything else on: the European Commission’s September 5, 2023 decision naming Apple a gatekeeper for iOS, Safari and the App Store. From that designation flow the obligations Apple has spent two years fighting and grudgingly implementing — alternative app marketplaces on iPhone, sideloading, third-party payment processing, browser choice screens, and the Article 6(7) duty to give rival hardware and software the same access to iOS that Apple’s own products enjoy. Those rules were already binding. As of Tuesday, the principal challenge to their foundation is gone.

Apple’s lead argument was arithmetic. The company runs five App Store storefronts, for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Watch and TV, and argued they are five distinct services of which only the iPhone store clears the DMA’s usage thresholds on its own. The judges counted differently. “Those stores have the same purpose, namely to connect app developers with end users in order to facilitate the distribution of software applications,” the court wrote in joined cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24.

The iMessage claim died on standing. The Commission examined the service and declined, in February 2024, to designate it; the court held the leftover classification “does not, by itself, produce binding legal effects” that Apple could contest.

Eighteen years of one argument

Apple has made a single continuous case since the App Store opened on July 10, 2008: security requires control. It is why every app passes review, why iOS went its first seventeen years without sideloading, and why the company’s 2021 white paper warned that sideloading “would degrade the security of the iOS platform and expose users to serious security risks.”

The General Court’s answer was not that the argument is wrong. It was colder: the argument is beside the point. Gatekeeper status under the DMA turns on scale and entrenchment, not on Apple’s reasons for building the walls, and the court found the objections rooted in security and property rights were aimed at obligations that follow from designation rather than at the designation Apple was actually entitled to contest. Our read: after eighteen years, the full version of “trust us, it’s for your safety” finally reached a court with power over the business model, and the court ruled it couldn’t even get in the door.

“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,” Apple said in a statement reported by 9to5Mac, adding that it will “continue advocating for the innovation and privacy our European customers deserve.”

What remains for Apple is narrow. An appeal to the Court of Justice is possible on points of law only, within two months and ten days of notification, per the court’s press office; Apple has not said whether it will file one. The adjacent fights carry on along their own tracks. Courthouse News notes that disputes over how the Commission has applied the interoperability rules are still moving through EU courts, and last year’s €500 million anti-steering fine is under separate challenge.

The App Store turns eighteen on Friday. Old enough, in most of Europe, to be treated as an adult.