Apple lost in Europe today. The EU’s General Court threw out its challenge to being named a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act. The App Store and iOS stay under the rules, and Apple has to keep opening the iPhone to rival apps and stores.
Apple argued its five app stores, one each for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Apple Watch, should count separately. The court said they do the same job and count as one. The iOS challenge failed too. Apple can still appeal to the EU’s top court, but only on points of law, and only for two months.
This matters beyond app stores. The new Siri AI and many other Apple Intelligence features skip the EU at launch, and Apple’s reason each time is the cost of following this exact law. It sold those limits as a fair answer to a rulebook it was still fighting. The fight is over, and Apple lost.
The upside and the cost
The ruling helps users in Europe. They get more app stores, real sideloading, and services that interoperate with the iPhone. Prices can fall when developers route around Apple’s cut. The tradeoff is Apple’s to make: a more open iOS is also a less controlled one, and Apple’s case has always been that its control is what keeps the platform safe and consistent. Some of that friction now lands on European users too.
For Apple, losing the case removes a talking point but little money yet. Its argument is not just self-serving. A tightly controlled iOS is how Apple has kept malware rare, scams contained, and the experience consistent across a billion devices, and that curation is a real benefit users get in return for the closed model. Forcing the platform open puts some of that at risk. Apple keeps the leverage of deciding where features launch, so it can still hold the new Siri and other AI tools out of the EU. That protects both its model and the case it makes for user safety, at the price of a worse product for a rich market and a story that gets harder to sell. Ship everywhere and it loses the leverage. Hold back and it looks like it is punishing users for their regulators.
Neither side comes out clean. European users get more choice and a longer wait for Apple’s newest features, if they get them at all. Apple keeps its grip, but the line about blaming regulators only gets harder to sell from here.
