On 8 July 2026, the General Court of the European Union dismissed every argument Apple raised against its status as a "gatekeeper" under the Digital Markets Act, closing — for now — an 18-month legal campaign that began the day the European Commission first applied that label to the App Store, iOS and Safari. The judgment, delivered in Joined Cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24, matters less for what it says about Apple specifically than for the procedural wall it builds around the DMA as a whole: gatekeepers, the court held, cannot contest a specific compliance obligation before the Commission has actually tried to enforce it against a real product decision.
Five Storefronts, One Service
Apple's core substantive argument was that its five device-specific storefronts — the iOS App Store, iPadOS App Store, watchOS App Store, macOS App Store and tvOS App Store — are functionally distinct products, and that only the iPhone version cleared the DMA's user and revenue thresholds for gatekeeper status. The General Court rejected that reading outright. It found that, irrespective of the devices in question, the stores "have the same purpose, namely to connect app developers with end users in order to facilitate the distribution of software applications," and that device-specific differences don't create separate core platform services. In DMA terms, Apple's entire app-distribution footprint — not just the iPhone slice — counts toward the thresholds that trigger gatekeeper obligations.
The Interoperability Fight That Wasn't Actually Fought
The more consequential holding is procedural. Apple tried to challenge Article 6(7) of the DMA — the provision requiring gatekeepers to open operating systems, hardware features and software to interoperate with third-party products — as a violation of its property and business-freedom rights under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The General Court never reached that question. It ruled the challenge inadmissible, reasoning that Article 6(7) "constitutes neither the legal basis of the designation decision nor a rule having a direct legal connection with that decision." A gatekeeper, in other words, cannot use an annulment action against its designation to pre-emptively attack an obligation that only bites later, once the Commission issues a specific decision under it.
The same logic sank Apple's iMessage complaint. The Commission classified iMessage as a "core platform service" in 2023 but ultimately declined to designate Apple as a gatekeeper for it after a market investigation closed on 12 February 2024. Apple wanted the classification struck down anyway, worried it could be revived later. The court disagreed: a classification with no accompanying designation "does not, by itself, produce binding legal effects," so there is nothing yet for a court to annul.
Steelmanning the Commission
The sequencing logic isn't unreasonable. The DMA was built to move fast against a small set of firms — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft were named the first six gatekeepers on 6 September 2023 — precisely because ordinary EU competition enforcement had taken a decade or more per case against those same companies. If every gatekeeper could tie up each of the DMA's roughly twenty substantive obligations in abstract, pre-enforcement litigation the moment it was designated, the law's central promise — faster, more predictable intervention in digital markets — would collapse into the same multi-year attrition the DMA was designed to avoid. Forcing challenges to wait for a live enforcement decision also means courts review obligations against real facts rather than hypotheticals, which is ordinarily sound judicial practice, not a rights violation.
Where Proportionality Gets Lost
But the sequencing cuts against gatekeepers in a way that deserves more scrutiny than the ruling gives it. Under this framework, a company must first comply with a novel obligation — reengineering products, opening APIs, exposing hardware features to rivals — and only afterward, once the Commission has enforced that obligation against a specific implementation, can it ask a court whether the underlying rule was lawful at all. That is a real cost, borne immediately, in exchange for a judicial review right that arrives, if at all, years later. For a rule as open-textured as Article 6(7), which authorizes the Commission to specify what "interoperability" requires through later implementing and enforcement decisions rather than enumerating it upfront, that gap matters. EFF's take on the ruling — cheering it because "interoperability allows users, and not the manufacturers of their devices... to decide what application best serves them" — is right on the merits of open ecosystems. But good policy and fair process aren't the same question, and a company should ordinarily be able to test a rule's lawfulness before, not only after, absorbing the cost of complying with it.
What Comes Next
Apple can still appeal points of law to the Court of Justice within two months and ten days of notification, per the Court's own procedural note — a genuine but narrow avenue, since factual findings like the "one core platform service" determination are largely locked in at this stage. The ruling's real audience isn't Apple, though; it's the other five designated gatekeepers, who now know that abstract, pre-enforcement challenges to DMA obligations are foreclosed as a legal strategy. The Commission gets a cleaner runway to enforce; gatekeepers get a narrower, later window to object. Given how central Article 6(7)-style interoperability mandates are likely to become to the next wave of DMA enforcement, that trade-off — not the App Store technicality — is the part of this ruling worth watching.