Apple ran out of EU courts — every challenge to its App Store obligations dismissed

Apple filed three separate legal challenges to the EU’s Digital Markets Act, targeting its gatekeeper designation, the App Store obligations, and iMessage. The EU General Court dismissed all three.

For the 450 million iOS users in the European Union, the ruling converts what had been contested obligations into a permanent regulatory baseline. Alternative app stores — which Apple began permitting under protest — must now remain accessible. Third-party interoperability requests must be addressed. Anti-steering provisions, which prevented Apple from directing users away from competitor payment systems, cannot be reversed through litigation. The App Store’s formerly closed distribution model has a court-confirmed successor architecture, whether Apple shaped it willingly or not.

The procedural element of the ruling carries implications beyond Apple. The EU General Court reaffirmed what the Commission calls the sequencing rule: companies designated as gatekeepers cannot challenge DMA obligations in abstract — they must wait for specific enforcement actions before litigating. This forecloses the pre-emptive litigation strategy every major tech platform might otherwise use to delay compliance until courts resolve the underlying gatekeeper designation. Regulators in Brussels now have a cleaner enforcement runway for non-Apple gatekeepers too.

What the ruling does not settle is how compliance unfolds in practice. Apple’s €500M penalty for earlier DMA violations remains under separate appeal. The General Court decision removes legal doubt about the existence of the obligations but not about the scope of compliance — and the enforcement history across EU tech regulation suggests that the implementation fight can stretch years past the legal one. Apple continues to argue that its compliance posture is sufficient; the Commission continues to disagree on specific points. The ruling changes the terrain of that argument, but not its resolution.

Apple still has one appellate path available: the European Court of Justice, but only on points of law from the iMessage case (declared inadmissible rather than dismissed). The core iOS and App Store designations ended at the General Court. Three years of litigation produced no escapes — it produced a precedent. The structural outcome: alternative distribution of iOS software in the EU is no longer a question of whether but of how tightly Apple can control the terms of how.

Tags: Apple, EU, App Store, Digital Markets Act, DMA, ios