The Lisbon Court of Appeal has rejected a consumer association's claim that Vodafone's Portuguese operator engaged in planned obsolescence when it withdrew a subscription-dependent GPS tracker from sale in June 2022, holding that Portuguese law imposes no obligation on a company to keep a connected service running indefinitely. The unanimous judgment, dated October 22, 2026, upheld a first-instance ruling of August 5, 2025, that had dismissed the class action in its entirety. The association won on a single point: the court revoked the order that it pay the costs of the first-instance proceedings, finding that the claim, although unsuccessful, was not manifestly unfounded.

The ruling, case 11086/23.0T8LSB.S1.L1-2, was handed down by the 2nd Section of the court, with Judge João Severino as rapporteur, alongside Judges Arlindo José Colaço Crua and Paulo Fernandes da Silva. It is published in the Portuguese courts' public case-law database. The judgment anonymises the parties - the operator appears as "B, SA" and the plaintiff association as "A" - and calls the product "X". The operator's own submissions, reproduced in the ruling, refer to Vodafone by name, and the court's reasoning refers once to the device as "Curve", the name Vodafone used for its GPS tracker. The judgment is written in Portuguese; the quotations below are English translations.

In Short

A Portuguese appeal court ruled that Vodafone did not break consumer law when it stopped selling a GPS tracker that only works with its own €3-a-month mobile service, because there is no legal duty to keep such a service running forever. The case matters to any company that sells hardware which depends on its own subscription, app or network, since the consumer group argued the device and its service should be judged as a single product. The court decided the case on facts fixed at trial, which described the service as still running, even though Vodafone itself told the appeal court the service ended on July 31, 2024.

The product at the centre of the case

The device was a small GPS locator, marketed in Portugal at least between November 2020 and June 2022, according to the facts established at first instance. The court described it as a tracker that "allows for use in different situations, such as, among others, always knowing where pets, vehicles, keychains, suitcases, or school backpacks are."

It did not work on its own. The judgment lists two components: an Internet of Things device with location capabilities via GPS sensors and GSM mobile technology, and a connectivity service over the operator's mobile network, with roaming, that linked the device to a smartphone application called SmartTech. The application handled location, configuration, subscription payments and interaction with the locator. The tracker shipped with an embedded V-SIM, also called a Smart SIM, which, according to the established facts, could not be used in any device outside the operator's own IoT range and "has nothing to do with the SIM cards used in telephone equipment for mobile communications." The Smart SIM used the group's global network in more than 90 countries.

The pricing was set out in detail. The device had a recommended retail price of €49.90, with actual prices between €29.90 and €49.99 depending on the type of data subscription chosen. The service cost €3 a month or €29.90 a year, with the first month free under either option. Postpaid customers paid the fee on their monthly invoice, while prepaid customers had it deducted from their balance. According to the findings, the subscription "does not have, and never has had, any associated commitment period," and customers could cancel at any time.

Adoption was weak. The court accepted that the product "experienced a lack of customer adoption and a reduced market impact," and that the Portuguese operator had only about 2,000 customers for the service. Only in about a dozen of those cases had a full refund been needed because no replacement stock was left for faulty units under warranty. At the €49.90 list price, 2,000 devices would amount to less than €100,000 in hardware sales, according to PPC Land's calculation - a modest sum set against the scale of the legal arguments that followed.

What changed on June 30, 2022

The trigger for the dispute was a decision taken above the Portuguese company. According to the established facts, the product was launched in several countries "by decision of Group B," on a global platform, and its terms of sale and commercial parameters were defined by the group. The hardware itself was made by third parties and bought centrally by the group for distribution to its national companies.

On June 30, 2022, the device stopped being available through physical and online channels. The group stopped buying from the manufacturer and stopped supplying the Portuguese operator. From that date, with a view to an eventual discontinuation that the trial court described as "still without a scheduled date," the operator stopped accepting new subscriptions and stopped renewing annual plans. Existing customers could switch to monthly billing "without any obligation or penalty." The stated purpose was that, when the service was eventually switched off, "no customer will be faced with the situation of having a paid subscription beyond the eventual date of cessation of service provision."

Customers on annual plans received text messages, set out in the judgment, warning that the annual SmartTech subscription would become unavailable on the renewal date and that keeping the service active required a switch to monthly billing in the app. Those who did not switch had the service deactivated at the end of their subscription.

The operator also put in place a refund procedure. For any malfunction during the warranty period where a replacement was impossible because of a lack of stock, customers were entitled to a full refund of the price paid or, where that could not be determined, of the device's commercial value on the date of its withdrawal - €49.90. If the operator could verify from an invoice that a customer had bought the device on promotion, the amount actually paid was refunded instead. Any unused portion of a monthly or annual subscription would also be refunded in full if the device stopped working and could not be replaced. The operator guaranteed that all customers who bought the device before June 30, 2022, would have the service active for at least the duration of the warranty period.

What the association asked for

The plaintiff is described in the established facts as an association whose purpose is to defend consumers in the European Union, its members, and consumers in general who are EU citizens or third-country nationals living in the EU. It brought a popular action - Portugal's collective action procedure, rooted in Article 52(3) of the Portuguese Constitution and Law No. 83/95 of August 31 - seeking a sweeping set of declarations.

It asked the court to recognise that the operator's conduct amounted to "a practice of induced obsolescence," that Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices opposed selling a good whose operation depended on a service marketed exclusively by the seller and then, "after less than two years," deliberately discontinuing that service without compensation, and that the conduct was an unfair commercial practice, a deceptive action and a practice of undue influence.

The financial claims were layered. The association sought compensation for the price consumers paid for the device, to be set by expert evidence or on an equitable basis; moral damages for "the loss of a serious, real and credible opportunity to obtain the result they expected"; moral damages for the breach of trust in "the B brand, as a market leader in its segment"; and compensation for the distortion of competition under Article 4 of Law No. 23/2018. As alternatives, it sought restitution on grounds of unjust enrichment or the right to terminate the purchase contract under Article 15(1) of Decree-Law No. 84/2021, with a refund of the price. Interest was to run from the date of the alleged practices.

Two requests stand out for companies watching the growth of collective litigation in Europe. The association asked the court to order the operator to cover its costs, including legal opinions from university professors and "the costs of litigation funding that she may eventually obtain by way of entering into a contract for that purpose, which is currently being negotiated." It also asked that the operator be ordered to publish the final judgment in two newspapers at its own expense, backed by a penalty of €1,000 for each day of delay for the first 20 days and €50,000 for each day after that.

The first-instance ruling and the route to appeal

The first-instance court dismissed the action in full on August 5, 2025, acquitting the operator of every claim and ordering the association to pay costs. It rejected the operator's request that the association be condemned as a litigant in bad faith.

The association appealed and sought to take the case directly to the Supreme Court of Justice on points of law only, a route known as an appeal per saltum. That choice had consequences. Because the appeal was confined to legal questions, the facts established at first instance could not be reopened, a point the Lisbon court made explicitly when it noted that "the selection of which was not challenged - the appeal being limited to the assessment of legal matters." The operator, for its part, argued that direct appeals were the association's "modus operandi in all the popular actions it incessantly brings against Vodafone."

Forty grounds of appeal

The association's appeal set out 40 conclusions. Its central argument was that the device should never have been treated as a simple physical object. It described the product as "a functional set composed of equipment, X mobile connectivity, VSIM/Smart SIM, application, and its own digital platform," and argued that the exclusive V-SIM, the subscription and the app "required a unitary assessment of the product, and not an artificial separation between hardware, service, application, and platform."

From that premise, the association argued that the tracker was a good with digital elements under Decree-Law No. 84/2021, which transposed Directive (EU) 2019/771 into Portuguese law, and that conformity required "the maintenance of functionality, compatibility, interoperability, durability and economic utility legitimately expected by the consumer, and not merely residual technical functionality." In the association's words, "a connected good may continue to operate in a limited way and still be non-compliant due to the loss of essential conditions of use," and "an active service does not equate to a compliant service in terms of functionality, durability, interoperability, support, and cost of use."

The association put a figure on the harm from the end of annual plans. Removing the annual option, it argued, raised the yearly cost of use from €29.90 to €36 - twelve monthly payments of €3 - "with a minimum financial difference of €6.10 per year per affected consumer." It also argued that unfair commercial practices under Decree-Law No. 57/2008 do not require an intention to harm, that the trial court had applied the burden of proof too rigidly, and that the first-instance ruling was void for failing to assess whether to refer questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union on Directives 2005/29/EC, 2019/771 and 2011/83/EU.

The group dimension was addressed head-on. "The fact that the decision to withdraw the product originated from Group X or that the equipment was manufactured by third parties is irrelevant to consumers," the association argued, "since the Defendant was the one who marketed the product, provided the connectivity, and controlled the ecosystem essential to its operation."

Vodafone's answer: no duty of "technological perpetuity"

The operator's response, reproduced at length in the judgment, framed the case as an attempt "to transform what constituted a normal and progressive commercial discontinuation of a technological product into an alleged illicit practice of 'induced obsolescence.'" Its core proposition was blunt: the law "does not establish any obligation of technological perpetuity."

Vodafone argued that consumers knew from the moment of purchase that the device depended on a mobile service and an app, that the contractual model rested on a continuous subscription "with no contractual guarantee of perpetuity, eternal continuity, or unlimited maintenance of the technological infrastructure," and that this dependence was "inherent, moreover, to the very nature of IoT products." What the association had never shown, it said, was "any willful concealment of reality, any technical manipulation intended to artificially disable the equipment, any hidden defect, any clandestinely introduced functional limitation, or any deliberate reduction of the product's lifespan."

The submission also contained facts that do not appear among the findings the court relied on. "The service associated with product X was indeed discontinued on July 31, 2024," the operator stated. It said it had kept the service active for existing customers "for 3 years and 9 months, from November 2020 to July 2024," and that on termination customers were told they would receive "a credit corresponding to twelve monthly payments and a voucher worth €35 intended for the purchase of a new locator device." At the €3 monthly rate, that would mean a €36 credit plus the €35 voucher, or €71 per customer, according to PPC Land's calculation - above the device's €49.90 list price. Vodafone described the product as one whose maintenance "ceased to be economically sustainable given the very low market uptake," and argued that accepting the association's reasoning would impose "a perpetual obligation of technological maintenance regarding any digital platform, connected service, or technological infrastructure associated with products marketed to consumers."

How the court ruled

Procedural objections

The court dismissed the claims that the first-instance judgment was void. Following a ruling of the Porto Court of Appeal of May 20, 2024, it held that a judge "is not obliged to assess each of the factual or legal arguments that the parties invoke," and that the alleged failure to consider a referral to the Court of Justice of the European Union did "not correspond to reality."

Standing and the nature of the claim

The court accepted that the association had standing under Article 2(1) of Law No. 83/95, which grants the right of popular action to associations defending the protected interests "regardless of whether or not they have a direct interest in the lawsuit." Citing a Supreme Court of Justice judgment of June 2, 2026, it classified the case as one concerning homogeneous individual interests - individual consumer rights that are "perfectly divisible," aggregated only because each consumer's legal relationship with the company has formally identical content. The headnote of the judgment sets out the five forms a popular action can take: "preventive, destructive or annulment, repressive, compensatory, and supplementary or substitutive."

EU law and competition claims

Much of the association's case rested directly on EU directives. The court restated that a directive, unlike a regulation, must first be transposed by member states, and noted that Directive 2005/29/EC was transposed by Decree-Law No. 57/2008, Directive 2011/83/EU partly by Law No. 47/2014, and Directive (EU) 2019/771 by Decree-Law No. 84/2021. The claim under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union failed at the outset. "We fail to see how," the court wrote, the conduct could be treated as abuse of a dominant position, "further evidenced by the fact that it has not been proven that the Respondent is a market leader in its segment." The rules on distance and off-premises contracts in Decree-Law No. 24/2014 did not apply either, because nothing in the facts showed the contracts were concluded remotely or outside the operator's shops.

Planned versus premature obsolescence

The court drew a distinction that sits at the centre of the ruling. Obsolescence, it held, "may be premature when it results from normal technological development, or planned when it results from a strategy in which industries design and manufacture products with a deliberately reduced lifespan, or in which they fail to update them, as a way of forcing the consumer to purchase a new model." The association had accused the operator of the second kind. The facts, in the court's view, did not support it.

The group shield

The court then turned to who took the decision. The operator has its own legal personality, the judges noted, despite its "apparent inclusion (the specific inclusion was not proven)" in Group B. Because neither party had challenged the group relationship, the court applied Article 503 of the Portuguese Commercial Companies Code, under which a dominant company may give binding instructions to a subordinate company, "even if unfavorable to the latter," provided they serve the interests of the parent or other group companies. The conclusion was direct: "it is impossible to attribute to the Respondent the decision, taken by Group B, to discontinue the availability of equipment 'X' in the commercial offer."

That decision, the court added, did not affect the continued provision of the service to existing customers. "In other words, we are not facing any situation of deliberate deterioration of the service in question."

No proven loss, no proven deception

On the switch from annual to monthly billing, the court found no concrete loss. "It was not proven that the elimination of the annual subscription increased the annual cost of use from €29.90 to €36, with a minimum patrimonial difference of €6.10 per year per affected consumer," it wrote. It treated the discontinuation of the service as "a mere possibility" on the established facts, held that the device "remains operational (and not, as the Appellant claims, in a merely residual manner)," and found the duty to inform had been met through information on the operator's website, in its shops and through its customer channels.

The passage most likely to be cited in future disputes came next. "Nor is there a legally imposed obligation to ensure the perpetuity of a given service," the court held, warning that the contrary view would risk "unjustifiably hindering technological progress (forcing companies to accumulate their products ad infinitum, without, from a market perspective, being able to discontinue them when obsolete and replace them with others more attractive to the consumer) and also unjustifiably restricting the freedom of private economic initiative."

The court also noted that a lack of replacement stock does not leave consumers without protection, pointing to the remedies in Article 15 of Decree-Law No. 84/2021, and to the operator's refund procedure.

Fault, damage and unjust enrichment

Under Portuguese contract law, fault is presumed and the burden falls on the debtor to rebut it. The court found that the operator had done so, because the association had not proved that the device was deliberately designed or sold to become useless in a short period. The claimed damages - breach of trust, distress, loss of opportunity - were not proved either. The alternative claim for unjust enrichment failed on the same facts: the court did not see how the operator had been enriched at the consumers' expense, given that the service "remains operational and has not been discontinued, according to the established facts," and held that the change in billing "did not bring a concrete financial contribution to the Respondent, nor did it result in actual impoverishment for those represented."

Costs: the association's one win

The association's final argument succeeded. Under Article 4(1)(b) of the Court Costs Regulation, anyone exercising the right of popular action is exempt from court fees. The exemption falls away where the claim is manifestly unfounded and, for certain charges, where the exempt party's claim fails entirely. Drawing on a Supreme Court of Justice ruling of June 23, 2022, the court defined manifest lack of merit as a case where "the appellant's lack of reason is evident," and found that the first-instance judgment had not specifically considered this. Its conclusion: "we are not faced with a manifest lack of merit in the claims that justifies not exempting the Appellant from the payment of court fees."

The operative part of the judgment therefore does two things: it revokes the first-instance judgment "insofar as it ordered the Appellant to pay the costs" and upholds it "in all other respects." No costs were awarded on appeal, since the association is exempt.

A ruling built on facts frozen before the shutdown

The judgment contains a tension it does not resolve. The facts established at first instance describe the discontinuation of the service as something "which has not yet occurred," and state that it "has not yet been made public, solely because it has not yet been defined by Group B." The appeal court relied on those facts in October 2026, writing that the discontinuation "did not actually occur, constituting instead a mere possibility."

Yet Vodafone's own submission to the same court stated that the service was discontinued on July 31, 2024 - more than a year before the first-instance judgment of August 5, 2025, and more than two years before the appeal ruling. The established facts appear to describe the position at an earlier stage of the proceedings, which began in 2023 according to the case number. Because the association chose an appeal limited to points of law and did not contest the facts, the court reasoned on the record as fixed at trial. The judgment does not address the end-of-service date or the credit and voucher that Vodafone said it offered.

Reporting from other markets is consistent with a group-wide wind-down. According to iphone-ticker.de, Vodafone confirmed in September 2022 that sales of its Curve tracker, Curve Bike and Neo kids' watch in Germany had stopped on June 30, 2022, citing a lack of demand - the same date found by the Portuguese court. The same outlet reported in May 2024 that Vodafone would end its entire Smart Tech portfolio in Germany on August 1, 2024, with devices using integrated, non-replaceable SIMs ceasing to work, while devices with an accessible SIM slot could continue on another carrier's SIM. In Spain, according to Xataka Móvil, the Curve service ended on July 1, 2024, and the device could not be used with any other operator.

Why the case matters beyond Portugal

The device was small and the customer base tiny. The legal questions are not. Marketers and product teams increasingly sell hardware whose value depends on a proprietary service: trackers, smart-home cameras, wearables, connected TVs and streaming sticks, point-of-sale terminals. When the service goes, the hardware often goes with it. The association's argument - that device, SIM, app and platform form a single product whose conformity must be judged as a whole - is the theory that consumer groups are likely to press again.

This court did not need to decide whether that theory was right in principle, because it found no proven loss of functionality, no deception and no damage on the established facts. What it did decide may prove just as important. It held that Portuguese law contains no general duty to keep a service alive indefinitely, and it accepted that a national subsidiary could not be held responsible for a product withdrawal decided by its group under Article 503 of the Commercial Companies Code. What weighed in the operator's favour was a documented record: no commitment period, information available in shops and online, a migration path from annual to monthly billing with no penalty, a guarantee of service through the warranty period, and a refund procedure.

The legal ground is also shifting. The devices in this case were sold between 2020 and 2022, under the rules then in force. Since September 27, 2026, sellers across the EU have had to display a harmonised notice about the two-year legal guarantee, under rules that rest on Directive (EU) 2019/771 and on Directive (EU) 2024/825 on empowering consumers for the green transition, alongside an optional label for producers offering durability guarantees beyond two years. Outside the EU, Quebec has gone further: its law to protect consumers from planned obsolescence brought legal warranties of good working order of three to six years into force on October 5, 2026, which now reach Google Shopping ads. In Brussels, the planned Digital Fairness Act has met resistance from the advertising sector, with IAB Europe and allied associations arguing in a July 2025 letter that existing rules already cover the concerns.

Bundles of hardware and service face scrutiny in other jurisdictions too. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission and eight states sued Toast on October 29, 2026 over "$0" hardware claims and undisclosed early termination fees attached to its restaurant point-of-sale service - a different legal regime and a business-to-business setting, but a similar question of what buyers are told about the service that the hardware depends on.

Collective actions and the cost of losing

The costs ruling deserves attention from any company exposed to European consumer litigation. The association lost on every substantive point, at two levels of jurisdiction, and still leaves the case owing no costs under the judgment. The threshold the court set - a claim must be one where the lack of merit is "evident" before the exemption is lost - is high. The association had also told the court that it was negotiating a litigation funding contract. Together, these features lower the financial risk for associations that bring popular actions in Portugal, and the operator's description of an association that sues it "incessantly" suggests this was not the last such case.

Portugal's popular action predates the EU's push on collective redress, but it sits within a broader trend that PPC Land has followed closely. The Representative Actions Directive created a framework for designated organisations to seek injunctions and compensation on behalf of consumers. In December 2024, the privacy group noyb gained authority to bring such cases across the EU after being designated a qualified entity. Ireland's High Court approved the country's first class action, brought by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties against Microsoft over real-time bidding data, on May 26, 2025. And on December 2, 2025, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Dutch courts could hear representative actions on behalf of all Dutch App Store users against Apple.

Would a different record have changed the outcome? The judgment offers some clues. The court stressed that it was "neither alleged nor proven" that the operator had contractually guaranteed perpetual service, and it rejected the €6.10 annual cost claim for want of proof, not on principle. The association's theory of a single connected product, and its argument that an active service is not necessarily a compliant one, were left without a direct answer. For now, though, the Lisbon judges have set out a clear position: a company that withdraws a connected product, keeps the service running for existing customers, informs them and refunds what it cannot replace has not, on that basis alone, engaged in planned obsolescence.

Timeline

Summary

Who: The Lisbon Court of Appeal (Judges João Severino, Arlindo José Colaço Crua and Paulo Fernandes da Silva), Vodafone's Portuguese operator, anonymised in the judgment as "B, SA", and an unnamed consumer association that defends consumers in the EU, acting for buyers of a GPS tracker with about 2,000 Portuguese customers.

What: The court unanimously upheld the dismissal of a popular action accusing the operator of planned obsolescence, unfair commercial practices and non-conformity over a €49.90 tracker that only worked with the operator's €3-a-month service, holding that there is no legal obligation to keep a service running in perpetuity and that the product withdrawal was a group decision. It revoked only the order that the association pay first-instance costs.

When: The judgment is dated October 22, 2026. The device was withdrawn from sale on June 30, 2022, the first-instance ruling came on August 5, 2025, and Vodafone told the court the service ended on July 31, 2024.

Where: Lisbon, Portugal, in case 11086/23.0T8LSB.S1.L1-2, with the wider product wind-down also reported in Germany and Spain.

Why: The case tests whether a company that sells hardware dependent on its own subscription, SIM and app can lawfully withdraw that product, and on what terms. The ruling sets out what protected the operator - information, refunds, no commitment period and continued service through the warranty period - while leaving open the association's argument that a connected device and its service should be judged as a single product.