Apple today lost its bid to overturn gatekeeper status for the App Store and iOS, after the General Court of the European Union dismissed three related legal challenges in a judgment delivered in Luxembourg. The ruling, issued by the Eighth Chamber sitting with five judges, closes out litigation that Apple filed in late 2023 and early 2024 against the European Commission's decisions under the Digital Markets Act, and it leaves the company's core obligations as a designated gatekeeper fully intact.

The court joined three separate cases, T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24, for the purposes of a single judgment. Each case attacked a different piece of the Commission's regulatory architecture, but all three shared a common thread: Apple's iMessage service, and whether the Commission was right to classify it as what EU law calls a number-independent interpersonal communications service, or NIICS. Apple lost on every point. According to the Court of Justice of the European Union's press release, "the General Court dismisses all the actions brought by Apple. It confirms the designation of Apple as a gatekeeper in relation to the App Store and iOS, and finds the actions concerning the iMessage service to be inadmissible."

The judgment matters to anyone tracking platform regulation because it settles, at least for now, how far a designated gatekeeper can go in contesting the scope of its obligations before those obligations actually bite. It also resolves a narrower but commercially significant question: whether Apple's five separate App Store storefronts, spanning iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Mac and Apple TV, count as one regulated service or five.

Background: how the case reached Luxembourg

The dispute traces back to July 2023, when Apple notified the Commission that four of its services met the quantitative thresholds set out in Article 3(2) of the DMA: the iOS App Store, the iOS operating system, the Safari browser and the iMessage service. Apple's notification did something unusual, though. For iMessage specifically, the company argued the service should not be classified as an NIICS at all and, even if the Commission disagreed, that exceptional circumstances meant it should escape gatekeeper obligations regardless.

The Commission was not persuaded on the first point but left the door open on the second. On September 5, 2023, it adopted two decisions simultaneously. One designated Apple as a gatekeeper for the App Store, iOS and Safari. The other opened a formal market investigation into whether Apple's arguments about iMessage could rebut the regulatory presumption that the service should be designated too. That investigation ran for roughly five months. On February 12, 2024, the Commission closed it, concluding that Apple should not, after all, be designated as a gatekeeper for iMessage. Crucially, though, the closing decision - like the one that opened the investigation, and like the original designation decision - continued to describe iMessage as an NIICS constituting a core platform service, even while declining to impose gatekeeper duties on it.

Apple's designation as a gatekeeper took legal effect on March 7, 2024, six months after notification, in line with Article 3(10) of the DMA. That timeline set the compliance clock running on the interoperability, anti-steering and other obligations that followed for the App Store, iOS and Safari.

Apple filed three separate actions in response. It challenged the decision to open the iMessage investigation. It challenged parts of the designation decision itself, including the interoperability obligations attached to iOS and the Commission's treatment of the five App Stores as a single service. And it challenged the decision that closed the iMessage investigation, even though that decision technically went in Apple's favor by declining to impose gatekeeper status on the messaging service.

The interoperability challenge: a plea that never got off the ground

The first substantive question the court addressed was whether Apple could challenge Article 6(7) of the DMA directly. That provision requires gatekeepers designated for an operating system to open interoperability, free of charge, to hardware and software providers on terms equivalent to what the gatekeeper's own products enjoy. Apple argued the provision was disproportionate under the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and, in particular, that it infringed the right to property.

To make that argument, Apple needed to invoke what EU procedure calls a plea of illegality under Article 277 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. This mechanism lets a party challenge a general rule indirectly, by attacking the individual decision that applies the rule to them, rather than needing separate standing to challenge the rule on its own. The catch is that the rule being challenged has to form the actual legal basis of the decision under attack, or at least have a direct legal connection to it.

The court found neither condition satisfied. Article 3 of the DMA, not Article 6(7), forms the legal basis of the designation decision. The interoperability obligations only attach once a service has already been designated; they do not determine whether that designation happens in the first place. As the judgment puts it, Article 6(7) "does not govern the conditions for designating an undertaking as a gatekeeper, the assessment of which is the main subject of the designation decision, but merely defines the interoperability obligations to which that undertaking is subject only once such designation has occurred." The court distinguished this from an earlier case Apple relied on, involving transitional and definitive staff-leave regimes at the EU institutions, on the basis that the DMA does not create a transitional-to-definitive sequence at all. It establishes, instead, two structurally separate stages: designation, then obligation. Separating them for legal purposes is not artificial; it reflects how the regulation itself is built.

Apple also argued that if it could not challenge Article 6(7) now, it would be denied effective judicial protection under Article 47 of the Charter. The court rejected that too, noting that the right of access to a tribunal is not absolute and can carry proportionate restrictions. It pointed out that Apple retains an alternative route: if the Commission later adopts an implementing decision under Article 8 of the DMA specifying how Apple must comply with Article 6(7), Apple can challenge that decision and raise the illegality plea at that later stage. The path exists; it simply has not opened yet.

Five App Stores, one regulated service

The second plea concerned something with more immediate commercial texture: whether Apple's App Store operations across five different device families should be treated as a single core platform service or five distinct ones. The distinction was not academic for Apple. If each store were assessed separately, the company argued, only the iOS App Store would meet the DMA's user and revenue thresholds, leaving the iPadOS, watchOS, macOS and tvOS stores outside gatekeeper scope entirely.

The Commission had reasoned, across several sections of the original designation decision, that all five stores serve the same function regardless of device: connecting business users offering applications with end users who download them. The court agreed. Under Article 2(14) of the DMA, a software application store is defined by the transaction it enables, not by the hardware it runs on or the operating system underneath it. The judgment states plainly that the DMA's definition of core platform services "should be technology neutral and should be understood to encompass those provided on or through various means or devices," a reading the court drew from recital 14 of the regulation. That neutrality, the court reasoned, exists specifically to stop a gatekeeper's own technical architecture from determining what counts as one regulated service and what counts as several.

Apple's counterargument leaned on usage differences between the stores: how often each was opened, what kinds of apps were downloaded through it, how the catalog looked on each device. The court accepted that such differences existed but found they went to the nature of the device experience, not to the underlying purpose of the store, which remained constant: facilitating a transaction between a developer and an end user. Apple did not dispute that each store, taken individually, met the DMA's definition of a software application store. Its argument was narrower, and ultimately unsuccessful: that five stores serving five devices should nonetheless be assessed as five separate regulated services.

iMessage: a classification without consequences, and therefore unchallengeable

The most legally intricate strand of the ruling concerned iMessage, and it produced an outcome that will read as counterintuitive to anyone expecting a clean win or loss. Apple challenged the NIICS classification in all three cases: in the designation decision itself, in the decision that opened the iMessage investigation, and in the decision that closed it. The court declared all three challenges inadmissible, not because the classification was correct or incorrect on the merits, but because the classification does not, by itself, do anything to Apple's legal position.

The reasoning turns on a distinction between the operative part of a decision, which is legally binding, and the recitals, which explain the reasoning but generally cannot be challenged on their own unless they form the essential basis for the operative part. iMessage is discussed at length in the recitals of the designation decision. But it does not appear in the operative part as a designated core platform service, because the Commission opened an investigation specifically to determine whether it should be. The investigation concluded that it should not.

According to the ruling, none of the DMA's substantive obligations, on interoperability, on the gatekeeper's conduct, on anything else, actually apply to a service unless that service is listed in the operative part of a designation decision as an important gateway. iMessage was never listed. The judgment states that "the DMA does not provide for any obligation or entail any legal consequences solely on the basis of the classification of a service, so long as the service in question has not been referred to in the operative part of a designation decision as an important gateway for business users to reach end users." Apple is not required to open iMessage to interoperability, is not subject to anti-steering rules for it, and faces no other DMA-derived duty connected to the service, notwithstanding its classification as an NIICS in the Commission's reasoning.

Apple raised a further concern: that the classification could still cause problems down the line, either by making it easier for third parties to later request that iMessage be designated, or by affecting how national regulators apply the separate European Electronic Communications Code, the EECC, to the service. The court addressed both points directly. On the first, it noted that Article 4(2) of the DMA requires the Commission to conduct a fresh assessment whenever it reviews whether a service should be designated, rather than simply inheriting a prior classification, so nothing about the current recitals locks in a future designation. On the second, it held that the DMA and the EECC operate as separate legal regimes, and that Article 1(4) of the DMA explicitly preserves the powers of national regulators enforcing the EECC without binding them to any classification the Commission has made for DMA purposes. National telecoms regulators, in other words, remain free to reach their own conclusions about iMessage under their own governing law.

Because the classification produces no binding legal effect and brings about no distinct change in Apple's legal position, the court held, it cannot be the subject of an annulment action under Article 263 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. That conclusion applied equally to the challenges against the decision opening the investigation and the decision closing it, since both decisions simply reproduced the same classification without attaching new consequences to it.

What the ruling settles, and what it leaves open

Taken together, the three rulings leave Apple's regulatory position for the App Store, iOS and Safari exactly where it stood after the September 2023 designation. The company must continue to comply with the DMA's obligations across those three services, including the interoperability duties under Article 6(7) that formed the subject of the first plea. The single-CPS finding for the five App Stores also stands, meaning Apple cannot later argue that only the iOS storefront should be in scope while the others operate outside gatekeeper rules.

For iMessage, the practical position is that nothing changes today. The service remains classified as an NIICS in the Commission's reasoning but carries no obligations, because it has not been designated as an important gateway. Whether that could shift in the future depends on a fresh Commission assessment, one the court has confirmed cannot simply rely on the reasoning already produced in 2023 and 2024.

The judgment also leaves open a narrower legal question the court did not need to resolve: whether the decision to open a market investigation is, in general, a preparatory act incapable of independent challenge. The court dismissed the actions concerning that decision on the separate ground that the NIICS classification produced no legal effect, so it did not need to reach the preparatory-act argument the Commission had also raised.

Costs followed the outcome. Apple Inc. and Apple Distribution International were ordered to bear their own costs and to pay those incurred by the European Commission across all three cases, as well as those incurred by the Coalition for App Fairness, which intervened in support of the Commission. The European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the French Republic, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Free Software Foundation Europe, all of which intervened at various points, were ordered to bear their own costs.

An appeal, limited to points of law, remains open to Apple before the Court of Justice of the European Union, within two months and ten days of formal notification of the judgment, according to the accompanying press release from the Court of Justice of the European Union's press and information unit.

Why this matters for digital marketing and platform policy

Apple's designation as a DMA gatekeeper has already reshaped how the company runs App Store distribution and payments in the European Union, with knock-on effects for how advertisers and developers plan spend, measurement and user acquisition across iOS. Apple's changes to iOS and iPadOS to comply with the Digital Markets Act opened the door to alternative app marketplaces, alternative payment processors and browser choice, changes that took effect only because the underlying gatekeeper designation held. Today's ruling forecloses, at least for now, the possibility that Apple could unwind those obligations by attacking the designation decision retroactively.

The single-CPS finding for the five App Stores carries its own significance for the marketing technology sector, since it forecloses any argument that Apple's smaller storefronts, on Apple Watch, Apple TV or Mac, could operate under a lighter regulatory regime than the iPhone App Store. That matters for developers building cross-device distribution strategies, and for any advertising or measurement vendor whose tooling depends on how Apple's app ecosystem is regulated device by device.

The iMessage strand of the ruling is arguably the more structurally important one for how the DMA develops going forward, because it establishes a general principle about when a Commission classification can be challenged at all. A similar dynamic played out a month earlier when the same General Court ruled on Meta's Marketplace and Messenger services. Under that judgment, the court annulled Facebook Marketplace's gatekeeper designation while explicitly upholding Messenger's classification as a standalone NIICS, a decision that, taken alongside today's Apple ruling, suggests the General Court is drawing a consistent line around what counts as a genuine, challengeable NIICS designation versus a preliminary classification without teeth. Both rulings confirm that a service can be described as an NIICS in Commission reasoning without being subject to a single DMA obligation, so long as it has not been formally listed as an important gateway.

For platforms tracking their own regulatory exposure, the practical lesson is narrower but concrete: contesting a Commission classification before it produces binding consequences is, per this ruling, generally not available as a legal avenue. Companies designated as gatekeepers, or classified in reasoning that stops short of formal designation, may need to wait until an actual obligation attaches before they can seek judicial review of it. That sequencing shapes how gatekeepers, and the wider ecosystem of developers, advertisers and competing platforms that operate around them, can expect future DMA disputes to unfold.

The ruling arrives as European regulators continue widening the DMA's reach elsewhere. The Commission opened market investigations into cloud infrastructure providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in November 2025, and Italy's competition authority opened a separate national inquiry into Apple's iCloud interoperability in June 2026, according to PPC Land's coverage of the AGCM's iCloud investigation. Today's judgment does not touch either of those proceedings directly, but it reinforces the same underlying architecture, designation first, obligation second, judicial review only once an obligation actually bites, that both investigations will eventually have to navigate.

Timeline

  • July 3, 2023: Apple notifies the European Commission that four services meet DMA gatekeeper thresholds, including iMessage, while disputing the iMessage classification.
  • September 5, 2023: The Commission designates Apple as a gatekeeper for the App Store, iOS and Safari, and separately opens a market investigation into whether iMessage should also be designated.
  • September 6, 2023: The designation decision is formally notified to Apple.
  • Late 2023 and early 2024: Apple files three separate actions before the General Court, against the decision opening the iMessage investigation, against parts of the designation decision, and later against the decision closing the iMessage investigation.
  • February 12, 2024: The Commission closes the iMessage market investigation, declining to designate Apple as a gatekeeper for the service while still classifying it as an NIICS.
  • March 7, 2024: Apple's gatekeeper obligations for the App Store, iOS and Safari become legally binding, six months after notification.
  • October 21, 2025: The General Court holds a hearing on Case T-1080/23.
  • July 8, 2026: The General Court, sitting in its Eighth Chamber with five judges, delivers judgment dismissing all three of Apple's actions.

Summary

Who: Apple Inc. and Apple Distribution International Ltd, as applicants, against the European Commission, as defendant, before the General Court of the European Union, with the French Republic, the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union, the Free Software Foundation Europe, the Coalition for App Fairness and the Federal Republic of Germany participating as interveners.

What: The General Court dismissed three joined actions, T-1079/23, T-1080/23 and T-214/24, in which Apple sought to annul its September 2023 gatekeeper designation for the App Store and iOS, along with related decisions opening and closing a separate market investigation into whether its iMessage service should also be designated under the Digital Markets Act.

When: The judgment was delivered on July 8, 2026, following a hearing held on October 21, 2025, and closes litigation that began with Apple's initial filings in late 2023 and early 2024.

Where: The case was heard by the Eighth Chamber of the General Court of the European Union, sitting with five judges, in Luxembourg.

Why: The ruling determines the scope of judicial review available to a company designated as a DMA gatekeeper, confirming that Apple's App Store operations across five device types count as a single regulated service and that a Commission classification carries no obligations, and is therefore not independently challengeable, unless it is formally listed as a designated core platform service.