What the court actually decided
On 8 July 2026, the General Court of the European Union dismissed Apple's joined challenges (Cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23, and T-214/24) to the European Commission's September 2023 decision naming Apple a "gatekeeper" under the Digital Markets Act (Court of Justice press release No. 96/26). Apple's central argument was structural: its App Stores for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV should count as separate core platform services, not one consolidated designation. Losing that argument matters because a narrower designation would have shrunk which of Apple's products carry gatekeeper obligations at all. The Court disagreed, holding that the DMA's device-neutral definitions don't let a single company subdivide its own ecosystem to dodge scope.
Apple separately argued that Article 6(7)'s interoperability mandate unlawfully interferes with its property rights under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Court didn't reach that claim on the merits — it ruled the argument inadmissible at the designation stage, since interoperability duties attach only after a gatekeeper designation, not as part of it (EFF). Procedurally, that closes an entire category of pre-emptive challenge: gatekeepers can no longer contest specific obligations by attacking the designation itself. They must wait for a concrete enforcement action.
The steelman for the DMA's approach
The Commission's underlying logic deserves a fair hearing before any criticism. Ex ante interoperability rules exist precisely because ex post antitrust enforcement — the EU's own multi-year cases against Google Shopping and Android are examples — takes so long that by the time a remedy arrives, the market has already tipped. Apple controls the only route onto roughly 2 billion active iOS devices; if switching an operating system's default messaging or app-distribution channel requires Apple's cooperation, and Apple has no commercial incentive to grant it, waiting for a decade-long monopolization case to force the issue isn't a serious alternative. Consolidating Apple's device-specific stores into one designation also reflects reality: a developer locked out of the iPhone App Store isn't meaningfully free to reach the same users through the Watch or TV store. Treating them as legally separate would have been a distinction without a difference — and one Apple would have used precisely to argue smaller subsets of its business fall below the DMA's user thresholds.
Where the proportionality case still holds
Even granting that logic, the record since the September 2023 designation cuts against treating court validation as evidence the framework is working well. Apple has received 56 formal interoperability requests under Article 6(7) since May 2025; 43 have been closed, and of the 16 closures made public, precisely zero produced a new interoperability solution — 10 were denied on technical grounds, 2 dismissed as duplicating existing features, 3 rejected as out of scope (FSFE). That is not a company slow-walking implementation of an otherwise-functioning process; it's a compliance channel that, on the numbers, has yet to produce a single working interoperability fix nearly three years after designation and over a year after the request window opened. The Commission's own April 2025 fine — €500 million against Apple for App Store anti-steering restrictions, alongside €200 million against Meta over its pay-or-consent advertising model (European Commission) — shows the enforcement side is not toothless. But a regulatory regime whose only functioning lever is retrospective fines, years after the underlying conduct, is functionally the same slow remedy the DMA was built to replace, just with the EU Commission instead of a court holding the gavel.
The more defensible criticism isn't that Apple should escape gatekeeper status — the Court's single-service reasoning is sound, and treating an ecosystem as one thing because a company built it as one thing is neither confiscatory nor unfair. It's that the DMA's interoperability machinery still lacks a binding timeline or technical arbitration backstop when a gatekeeper simply says no. The Commission's own specification proceedings against Apple over vertical interoperability exist precisely because Article 6(7) requests alone aren't resolving disputes. A proportionate next step is not weakening the designation regime this ruling upheld, but giving the Commission's specification process a hard clock — say, 90 days to approve, reject with public technical reasoning, or refer to binding arbitration — so "gatekeeper" obligations stop functioning as a compliance queue with no exit.
What changes now
Apple's legal room to contest the DMA's core architecture is largely gone; future fights will happen case-by-case, over specific enforcement actions like the April 2025 fine, not over whether Apple is a gatekeeper in the first place. For developers waiting on the 56 interoperability requests still working through the pipeline, the ruling changes little in practice — it removes an appeal Apple was using to stall, but doesn't itself produce a single new API.