The European Union has settled one of the longest-running fights over its flagship tech law. On 8 July the General Court dismissed every action Apple had brought against its designation as a gatekeeper, leaving the company bound by the gatekeeper rules that the Digital Markets Act imposes on the App Store and iOS.
Judges rejected Apple’s argument that regulators had stretched the law to cover services that do not dominate their markets. The court confirmed that the Commission correctly named the App Store and the iOS operating system as core platform services, the trigger that pulls a company into the DMA’s toughest tier of obligations.
The ruling matters far beyond Cupertino. The court told all six designated companies that they cannot contest their gatekeeper rules in the abstract. A firm must wait until the Commission issues a specific enforcement decision before it can ask judges to review a particular obligation, a sequencing point that removes a favoured delaying tactic across the sector.
The Commission has argued since 2023 that the DMA needs early legal certainty to work. Every year spent litigating the designation itself is a year in which rivals wait for interoperability, alternative app stores and fairer ranking. By closing that window, the court hands Brussels enforcers a faster path from rule to remedy.
Apple did not lose on every front. The court declared the company’s challenge over iMessage inadmissible, a technical outcome that reflects the Commission’s earlier decision not to designate the messaging service. That leaves Apple free of one obligation it had feared, even as it stays locked into the App Store commitments it fought hardest to avoid.
The practical effect lands on developers. Apple must keep allowing sideloading, rival payment systems and third-party app marketplaces inside the bloc, changes it rolled out reluctantly and has since tried to narrow through fees and friction. Regulators can now police those workarounds without first defending the designation that underpins them.
The company can still appeal on points of law to the Court of Justice, the EU’s highest bench. Such an appeal would not suspend the obligations, so the compliance regime stays in force while any further case runs its course. Given the breadth of the defeat, Apple’s room to overturn the core finding looks narrow. The Commission welcomed the judgment within hours.
For the wider industry, the message is blunt. The DMA is no longer an experiment awaiting judicial blessing; it is settled law with a court willing to defend both its scope and its enforcement design. Other gatekeepers weighing their own challenges now know the odds, and the calendar, work against them. Read the court’s press summary for the full reasoning.
What comes next is enforcement, not argument. With the designation secure, attention shifts to whether Apple’s fee structures and interoperability offers actually satisfy the law, a question the Commission is already probing. The court has cleared the ground; the harder contest over real-world compliance is only beginning.
