Apple’s two-year legal fight against the EU’s Digital Markets Act just hit a wall. The General Court in Luxembourg dismissed all three of Apple’s challenges on July 8, ruling that the company’s App Store and iOS gatekeeper designations were valid under the DMA’s “gatekeeper” rules and dismissing Apple’s iMessage challenge as inadmissible, leaving Apple to keep living with the obligations that come with that label.
“The General Court dismisses Apple’s actions regarding its designation as a gatekeeper in relation to the App Store and iOS,” the tribunal said in its ruling. That’s about as clean a loss as Apple could have gotten. All three arguments, gone, as reported by Reuters.
Apple’s Argument
Apple went to court in 2024 after the European Commission designated its five App Stores, on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch, as a single “core platform service” under the DMA. That single-service framing matters because it drags every one of Apple’s storefronts into the same compliance bucket rather than treating them separately.
Apple’s case had three parts:
- A challenge to the combined App Store designation covering all five platforms
- A challenge to iOS being classified as a “gateway” platform, which forces Apple to let rival services interoperate with it
- A challenge to iMessage being labeled a “number-independent interpersonal communications service,” which would subject it to EU telecoms rules
The court rejected the first two outright. The iMessage claim didn’t even get a ruling on the merits, the court found Apple’s action on that point inadmissible.
Gatekeeper status isn’t just a label. Under the DMA, a company qualifies once it hits €7.5 billion in EU sales or a €75 billion market cap, plus 45 million monthly active users and 10,000 business users in the bloc annually. Apple cleared those thresholds easily and was formally designated a gatekeeper for iOS, the App Store, and Safari back in September 2023, with iPadOS added in April 2024.
Once designated, gatekeepers can’t favor their own services over competitors’, can’t combine personal data across their different services without consent, and have to let users install alternative app stores. Those are the rules Apple has been trying to get out from under since day one, and now a court has told them the label sticks.
An Apple spokesperson didn’t back down after the ruling:
“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. We will continue advocating for the innovation and privacy our European customers deserve.”
Apple hasn’t confirmed it, but the obvious next move is an appeal to the Court of Justice of the European Union, the bloc’s highest court and the last stop for this kind of dispute. That would extend a fight that’s already run since 2024, and given how thoroughly this ruling went against Apple, a CJEU appeal is unlikely to reverse much. Losing all three claims at once, including having one thrown out as inadmissible, is not the outcome of a company that had a strong legal footing to begin with.
What makes this loss sting more is that the same General Court isn’t a rubber stamp for the Commission. Earlier in 2026, the court sided with Meta and annulled a gatekeeper designation the Commission had slapped on Meta Marketplace. That ruling proved the court will push back on Brussels when the Commission overreaches. Apple’s clean sweep loss, in the same court, in the same year, says the judges saw a much weaker case in Apple’s arguments than in Meta’s.
The gatekeeper ruling doesn’t stand alone as Apple is separately appealing a €500 million fine the EU issued in April 2025 for violating the DMA’s anti-steering rules, the ones that let developers point users to payment options outside Apple’s own system. Apple formally challenged that fine in July 2025 and the case is still working through the courts.
EU users are already feeling the practical fallout of Apple’s DMA fight. Apple delayed its new Siri AI assistant for iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 in the EU entirely, with SVP Craig Federighi saying the company was “deeply disappointed that our EU users won’t have Siri AI on iPhone or iPad when we share our new software releases later this year.” Apple has also spent 2026 lobbying against proposals to expand the DMA’s scope further, including opposing rules that
