A Property-Rights Defense That Didn't Land
On July 8, 2026, the EU's General Court dismissed Apple's challenge to its "gatekeeper" designation under the Digital Markets Act, rejecting the company's central legal theory: that the interoperability mandate in DMA Article 6(7) infringed its property rights under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. In the joined cases (T-1079/23 and T-1080/23), the Luxembourg court found the argument aimed at the wrong target — Article 6(7) does not, in fact, form the legal basis for Apple's designation, so a rights challenge to that provision couldn't unwind it (EFF, 2026-07-14). In a related case (T-214/24), the court also found Apple's parallel challenge to the Commission's preliminary iMessage classification inadmissible, since that classification "produced no binding legal effects" (JURIST).
The practical result: Apple's App Store — spanning iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV — remains, legally, a single core platform service for DMA purposes. The court accepted the Commission's reasoning that each App Store variant serves "the same purpose, namely to intermediate between end users and business users in the distribution of applications," rejecting Apple's argument that only the iPhone store met the DMA's usage thresholds and that the rest should be assessed separately. That single-service finding matters because it forecloses the most obvious escape hatch gatekeepers might use against the DMA: fragmenting a product line into technically distinct services, each too small to trigger designation on its own.
Steelmanning Brussels
The Commission's underlying case deserves to be stated on its own terms before it's critiqued. Apple's control over iOS app distribution is not a marginal chokepoint — it is, for a huge share of European smartphone users, the only legal channel through which software reaches their device, and Apple has historically set the commercial terms (a 15–30% commission, a ban on steering users to cheaper purchase options elsewhere) unilaterally. The Commission's April 23, 2025 decision fining Apple €500 million found precisely that Apple's anti-steering restrictions prevented developers from even telling consumers about alternative offers (European Commission) — a restraint on ordinary commercial speech that is hard to justify as a security measure. When a single company sets take rates, discovery rules and payment terms for an entire national market's mobile software economy, competition-by-market-forces breaks down, and the case for an ex ante interoperability rule — rather than years of after-the-fact antitrust litigation — is genuinely strong. The DMA exists because the EU's prior competition cases against Google and others took the better part of a decade to resolve, by which point the market had already tipped.
Where the Regulation Still Overreaches
That said, the court's single-platform reasoning cuts both ways, and gatekeepers are right to worry about its breadth. Apple's watchOS and Apple TV app stores serve fundamentally different security models, hardware constraints and developer ecosystems than the iPhone store — collapsing them into one regulatory unit because they share a distribution function risks applying iPhone-scale obligations to markets that never had iPhone-scale market power. A smartwatch app store with a fraction of the iPhone Store's volume shouldn't automatically inherit sideloading and alternative-payment mandates calibrated for a dominant mobile platform. The Commission itself seemed to recognize some of this nuance when it declined to designate Apple's advertising and Maps products under the DMA in February 2026, finding they didn't meet the thresholds — proof the framework can discriminate when it wants to (DMA Gatekeepers Portal). Applying that same discrimination to App Store sub-platforms, rather than bundling them by analogy, would have been the more proportionate reading.
The Enforcement Pattern Is Now Clear
What this ruling really confirms is that DMA enforcement has moved from designation fights to compliance fights, and the courts are backing the Commission at both stages. Apple was first designated a gatekeeper for the App Store, iOS and Safari on September 5, 2023, with iPadOS added April 29, 2024. Since then it has drawn the DMA's first-ever fine (the €500 million anti-steering penalty) and now a court loss on the foundational legal challenge to the whole regime. Apple can still appeal points of law to the Court of Justice of the EU, and the underlying obligations remain binding while that plays out. But the direction of travel — courts affirming broad Commission discretion to define "core platform service," and declining to let property-rights arguments override interoperability mandates — sets precedent that will bind Google's Android/Search case (an enforcement decision the Commission is expected to issue around July 27, 2026) and, eventually, Amazon and Microsoft's cloud investigations.
The Innovation Stakes
For smaller developers, interoperability wins are real and immediate: cheaper distribution, more payment choice, less platform tax. But the compliance burden of a regime broad enough to swallow a smartwatch app store alongside a smartphone one falls hardest on the gatekeepers with the deepest legal budgets — which paradoxically advantages Apple and Google over the next-tier platforms the DMA's dynamic-designation mechanism will eventually reach. A more calibrated ruling would have forced the Commission to justify obligations platform-by-platform rather than accepting a single sweeping designation. That the court didn't ask for it is the real story here — not that Apple lost, but how broadly it lost.