The Ruling
On July 8, 2026, the General Court of the European Union dismissed three joined actions brought by Apple — Cases T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24 — against the European Commission's September 6, 2023 decision designating Apple a "gatekeeper" under the Digital Markets Act, covering the App Store, iOS and Safari (Commission press release, Sept 6, 2023). Apple was one of six companies — alongside Alphabet, Amazon, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft — designated that day; the DMA now covers 23 core platform services across those gatekeepers (DMA gatekeepers portal).
Apple raised three pleas in T-1080/23. First, it argued Article 6(7) — the DMA's interoperability mandate — was unlawful under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights. Second, it argued the App Store should not be treated as a single core platform service, since Apple runs five separate storefronts (iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV) with different technical architectures. Third, it challenged the Commission's preliminary classification of iMessage as a "number-independent interpersonal communications service."
The Court rejected all three, but on distinct grounds (JURIST; Kluwer Competition Law Blog).
What the Court Actually Held
On the fundamental-rights plea, the Court didn't reach the merits — it ruled the challenge misdirected. As the judges put it:
"Article 6(7) of the DMA does not govern the conditions for designating an undertaking as a gatekeeper... but merely defines the interoperability obligations to which that undertaking is subject only once such designation has occurred."
In other words, a designation-decision appeal is the wrong vehicle to contest a substantive obligation that only bites after designation. Apple would need to wait for a concrete Article 6(7) enforcement or specification decision — and challenge that instead.
On the App Store, the Court found the five storefronts serve the identical function: intermediating between end users and business users distributing apps and digital content. Device-level technical differences don't change that functional equivalence, and Apple did not show usage patterns diverging enough to justify separate treatment (Kluwer Competition Law Blog).
On iMessage, the Court ruled the challenge inadmissible on narrower grounds: the Commission's operative designation decision never actually relied on the iMessage classification, so there was nothing binding for Apple to annul. Apple can, in principle, appeal to the Court of Justice of the EU on points of law within two months and ten days of notification (JURIST).
The Case for the Mandate
The strongest version of the Commission's position deserves to be stated plainly. Interoperability requirements exist because voluntary opening of APIs by an integrated hardware-software-storefront owner has, historically, been rare absent a legal backstop — the switching costs and technical lock-in that make a platform valuable to its owner are the same friction that keeps rivals out. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has litigated for platform openness for years, frames Article 6(7) as protecting users' right to choose which application serves them best rather than ceding that choice to the device manufacturer (EFF). Treating five App Store variants as one regulated service also closes an obvious evasion: if each device got its own carve-out, a gatekeeper could argue every hardware SKU deserves bespoke rules, fragmenting oversight into unworkable slices.
Where the Ruling Falls Short of Resolution
But this judgment resolves less than the headlines suggest. The Court didn't rule that Apple's Article 6(7) obligations are proportionate, narrowly tailored, or compatible with the Charter — it ruled that this particular lawsuit was the wrong place to litigate that question. The substantive fight over what interoperability actually requires — API access depth, security review timelines, whether Apple's compliance measures satisfy the statute — moves to case-by-case enforcement and specification proceedings, each separately appealable. That is a worse outcome for regulatory predictability than it looks. Businesses subject to the DMA were told the designation stage would settle who is covered and for what; instead, the Court has confirmed that the scope of coverage is settled early while the substance of the heaviest obligations stays contestable indefinitely, one enforcement action at a time.
That matters because Article 6(7) is not a simple non-discrimination rule — it requires exposing hardware and software feature access to third parties on the same terms Apple gives itself, which is precisely where security engineering and platform-integrity tradeoffs live. Deferring the proportionality fight to piecemeal enforcement means Apple (and the next five gatekeepers) will spend years litigating implementation detail rather than getting a single, clear ex-ante ruling on what the statute demands. Kluwer's own analysis of the judgment flags that the Court leaned heavily on deference to Commission economic reasoning rather than independently testing it (Kluwer Competition Law Blog) — a pattern that, if it holds through the enforcement-stage cases still to come, will mean the DMA's most consequential technical mandates get built through litigation attrition rather than legislative or standard-setting clarity. Proportionate regulation requires resolving hard tradeoffs once, transparently — not deferring them to a decade of sequential court fights that only the largest platforms can afford to run.