The General Court of the European Union has rejected Apple’s attempt to void its Digital Markets Act obligations, ruling on July 8, 2026 in joint cases that Article 6(7)’s interoperability mandate stands and that Apple’s App Store qualifies as a core platform service across iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS, according to EFF Deeplinks. For data companies and researchers who depend on access to closed platforms, this is the kind of ruling that determines whether alternative data pipelines from mobile ecosystems remain legally viable in Europe.
Apple ran three arguments and lost all three. It claimed Article 6(7) violated EU property rights under the Charter of Fundamental Rights; the court said that provision isn’t even the legal basis for gatekeeper designation, so the challenge missed its target. It argued the App Store isn’t a single ‘core platform service’ across devices; the court disagreed, finding each store version serves the same intermediation function between developers and end users regardless of device. And its bid to strip iMessage of number-independent interpersonal communication service status was tossed as inadmissible, since that classification alone doesn’t bind Apple legally without an accompanying designation decision.
Why This Matters for the Data Economy
For alternative-data vendors, app analytics firms, and academic researchers who study mobile operating systems, gatekeeper enforcement under the DMA is the mechanism that keeps Apple’s ‘walled garden’ from becoming a legal moat. A ruling that lets Apple redefine its own platforms out of scope — by device, by service, by product line — would have handed every designated gatekeeper (Alphabet, Amazon, Booking, ByteDance, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple) a template for narrowing obligations through litigation rather than compliance.
Security and interoperability keep getting framed as natural enemies in Apple’s court filings, but this ruling treats that framing as a policy argument, not a legal shield.
Apple’s security argument — that forced interoperability degrades the trust users place in its devices — got a partial nod from EFF but no traction with the court on this point, since the ruling addressed jurisdictional and definitional questions rather than merits of the security tradeoff. That fight isn’t over; expect Apple to keep raising security framing in implementation disputes even as the designation itself is now settled law. Watch for how Apple structures third-party app store access and researcher API terms in the coming months, since compliance mechanics — not the underlying designation — will determine whether this ruling actually changes what data flows out of Apple’s ecosystem.
the classification does not, by itself, produce binding legal effects that bring about a change in Apple's legal position
