A trio of rulings from the EU General Court has confirmed Apple’s designation as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act, dismissing the company’s challenge over the App Store and iOS in full and rejecting its separate case over iMessage as inadmissible.
The judgment, delivered jointly by the Luxembourg court on Wednesday, hands the European Commission one of its clearest wins yet in enforcing the regulation against a designated gatekeeper.
The court rejected Apple’s argument that the DMA’s interoperability obligations breached its fundamental rights, finding no direct legal connection between that provision and the underlying designation decision, and so declined to rule on the substance.
It also dismissed Apple’s bid to have its five App Stores — spanning iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV, treated as separate services, holding that each serves the same function of connecting developers with end users. Apple, which has brought five separate actions against the Commission under the DMA, remains the most litigious of the law’s designated gatekeepers.
A spokesperson said the company still regards the DMA’s mandate as disproportionate but would not confirm whether it intends to appeal to the Court of Justice of the EU.
Regulatory context matters here. Wednesday’s decision follows the General Court’s partial annulment of Meta’s gatekeeper designation last month and its 2024 dismissal of ByteDance’s challenge, giving the Commission a mixed but increasingly settled body of case law on how gatekeeper status is tested.
Two Apple matters remain outstanding: a challenge to the March 2025 order requiring Apple to open iOS to third-party developers, and an appeal against the €500 million fine imposed the same year for anti-steering breaches.
The ruling also lands weeks after Apple and the Commission traded public criticism over the bloc’s rules delaying the European rollout of Apple’s upgraded Siri assistant, a dispute that prompted a July 1 call between chief executive Tim Cook and the Commission’s tech chief, Henna Virkkunen, which Brussels described as constructive.
Meta and ByteDance, both already tested before the same court, gain little from Wednesday’s outcome, the General Court sidestepped the interoperability question on jurisdictional grounds rather than ruling on its merits.
The General Court’s refusal to engage with the interoperability challenge on its merits, disposing of it instead on jurisdictional grounds, leaves open whether a better-pleaded fundamental rights argument could yet succeed, a question likely to resurface as more of the Commission’s original 2023 gatekeeper designations reach appeal.
Advising a platform business on DMA exposure now means fewer procedural or rights-based ways to challenge a gatekeeper designation, and the next fight will have to be argued on the merits the court sidestepped here. Apple’s pending appeal against the Commission’s €500 million fine will be the first test of that narrower ground.